The Oxford English Dictionary says that a rite is ‘a formal procedure or act in a religious or other solemn observance’. The word comes into English through the French rite from the Latin ritus . Its original meaning escapes etymologists; and this is a mixed blessing, for we neither can nor must attempt a retrieval of its hidden roots. We are told by respectable etymologists that the word is associated from earliest times with Latin religious usage, but that even in (...) the early Latin it was already extended to ‘custom, usage, manner or way’ of a non-religious sort. [Lewis and Short, A Latin Dictionary .] So, too, in modern languages the terms ‘rite’ and ‘ritual’ have specifically religious meaning, but they are also used in social and cultural settings that we would not call religious. What first strikes us about the terms ’ and ‘ritual’ is an emphasis upon a certain formality, upon a regular and stable way in which an action or set of actions is to be performed. A ritual is more than a formalism, however, since there are formalisms that are not rites, such as the logical rules for making a valid argument. Moreover, the term is frequently associated with the terms ‘myth’, ‘symbol’ and ‘faith’. These, too, are primarily religious, but are also extended to non-religious contexts. Indeed, there seems to be a network of such terms whose usage touches upon some extraordinary quality in things. Like them, the term ‘ritual’ shares both a wide variety of meanings and a certain hint of impropriety. The variety of ritual forms is notorious, ranging from the most sacred religious liturgies to the absurdities of a fraternity initiation; and the impropriety of the term breaks out whenever we brand a certain action ‘ritualistic’, just as we sometimes refer slightingly to an assertion, saying it is ‘mythical’, ‘merely symbolic’ or ‘credulous’. (shrink)

According to the modal philosophy the many different arts serve to acknowledge and promote the career and value of existence. Architecture does not exist primarily because men need shelter, nor sculpture because men have hands, nor painting because they have eyes. Neither do story, poetry and theatre arise because men speak, nor music because they hear, nor dance because men leap. The arts are surrogates, embodiments and representatives of the mighty power of existence.

2. The title has been carefully chosen. It has three terms: being, immediacy, and articulation. The argument is such that, if one of the three collapses into another, the battle is lost. The threatened term is being. For if being is absorbed into immediacy, an exaggerated realism results. But if being is absorbed into articulation, idealism results; and that, it seems, is greatly to be deplored. Being, then, is the prize between "Immediatists" and "Articulatists." If being is reduced to articulation, (...) then whatever it is that the "Immediatist" seeks to save will have been lost. And if being is reduced to immediacy, then articulation will be alien to being, and so will philosophy. It is against this second reduction that Professor Smith chiefly argues, because it is the current one-sided wisdom which makes genuine philosophy impossible. (shrink)

PRELIMINARY to a new edition of her reminiscences, the American playwright Lillian Hellman complains.

John Paul II's encyclical Fides et Ratio reiterates in a new and fresh way the harmony of faith and reason. The dominant tradition of Catholic thought isone that sees this harmony, but the tradition is not uncritical. Throughout the history of the Church, there have been thinkers wary of reason. The thoughtof Karol Wojtyla, both before and during his papacy, has looked to a focus on the human person as a way to reconcile faith and reason.

IT is almost a century since Ferdinand Tönnies published his influential work, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft. In it he drew semantic lines around the conception of "community" that have persisted to this day in much of the literature. He intended his description to be widely applicable, but he drew it chiefly from ancient, medieval, and modern European society up to the present century. Moreover, he circumscribed the terms "community" and "society" by placing them in contrast with one another, binding them together (...) by the mutual antagonism of their meanings. Gemeinschaft is supposed to rest upon ties of blood and kinship, upon associations with the land and ties of place, and upon ties of friendship, shared feeling, and common belief. The prototype of Gemeinschaft is the family; and out of it have arisen extended communal forms of association, such as the village and neighborhood, the family farm, the older type of parish, and the more or less hereditary guild. The unity of such groups exists prior to their present members who receive the communal form and its values through tradition as a given way of life. In contrast with these bonds of kinship and friendship, Gesellschaft is supposed to be. (shrink)

The history of philosophy provides examples of attempts to vindicate the adequation of thought with being. Thought has sometimes armed itself in the Cartesian manner with criteria for measuring its own conformity with being. But such an immediate and direct appeal to "pure" thought rests inescapably upon a tacit appeal to a human experience which includes sensible factors; and so it begs the question. Moreover, it seems to me that all attempts fail which try to join the knower and the (...) known by putting the idea or judgment between them. For whether the intervention is by criterion, instrument, or method, it merely complicates the problem of their union by adding a useless intermediary. Indeed, in the face of the idealism of Descartes and Locke, and within the presuppositions of a theory of noetic species, modern scholastics were right to insist upon the "non-entity" of ideas and judgments. They insisted that a noetic principle, such as an idea or judgment, is nothing in itself but a pure sign, and that it is not an object which, while signifying something else, also exists in its own right as a mental entity. In trying to account for the concrete unity of language and cognition—which I may be forgiven for calling "linguo-knowledge"—there is much to recommend a theory of signs which differentiates knowledge-signs from all other kinds. It is an attempt to do justice to the quasi-instrumental features of linguo-knowledge, while at the same time keeping before us its radical ontological openness. Nothing intervenes between knowing and being, least of all the "equipment" of knowing, its ideas and judgments. The relationship between language and knowledge, however, would have to be determined more precisely since linguistic signs lend themselves to being considered as odd sorts of instruments, and by some linguists even as entities. Nevertheless, although linguistic signs are inseparable in concreto from noetic signs, it remains true that noetic signs are non-entitative, for there is a fundamental sense in which knowing is not an affair of entities or instruments at all. The essential possibility of knowledge lies in what has traditionally been called its immateriality and even its spirituality. (shrink)

If Hegel's philosophy were to be characterized by a phrase, it might be “The Dialectical System of Absolute Spirit.” The phrase would seem formidable to some but merely pretentious to others. There are recent signs of an exhumation of the systematic features of Hegel's philosophy in the English-speaking world, and it is to be hoped that the durable clichés of an earlier English period will not prevent a fresh look at Hegel's philosophy. There is, of course, no denying his systematic (...) ambitions, nor any wish on my part to do so. It is just these that I find fascinating. He sought to bring within a comprehensive intellectual order the whole of reality—and a little more besides, say his detractors. In the Phenomenology of Spirit by a turbulent dialectic he scrabblesup to the top of Mount Parnassus in order to clutch the petticoats of the Absolute. In the Science of Logic and in the first part of the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences he lays out the logical paradigm of intellectual necessities which are subsequently exhibited in the philosophy of nature and of concrete spirit. (shrink)

Nevertheless, some of Stirling's students did contract virulent forms of Hegelian speculation. What attracted Stirling and others is indicated in his description of how he first came to know of Hegel.

METAPHYSICS is the most controversial and controverted of the philosophical disciplines. I want to argue, nevertheless, that if it did not already exist in some form, then it would be necessary to invent it. For the need to think fundamentally is not incidental to the inquiring energy of the human mind. That energy has taken form as myth, meditation, and reflection among a variety of peoples of diverse cultures. In our rather abstract and articulate culture, however, fundamental thinking has taken (...) the rational, argumentative and conceptual form of discourse. (shrink)

THE THEME, "The Intelligibility of Nature," is exceedingly broad. It stretches like a vast domain in which one can only hope to leave a few footprints, some fragile impressions that are all but lost in the expanse. In attempting to understand the natural world, the enterprise that is most familiar to many of us is inherited from the Greeks and their Latin heirs, both classical and mediaeval, and this enterprise continues in our own day in the form of the modern (...) sciences of nature. Nowadays, we are more informed about the knowledge acquired by the Egyptians, Babylonians, and others prior to the Greeks. We are more conscious of the achievements of the Chinese in physics and the Indians in mathematics. And we are more aware of the medical and zoological lore present in oral traditions, such as those of Africa. Moreover, we are only now beginning to appreciate their contributions and their potential for new forms of enquiry, including other ways of approaching nature. The terms in which the topic is here designated, however, are conceived in Greek and expressed in Latin. Nevertheless, even within this cultural tradition of natural enquiry, the topic is quite broad enough. Like a grammarian of old parsing a sentence, I am forced to begin by distinguishing parts of the theme. (shrink)

THIS ESSAY was originally prepared for the 1988 Metaphysical Society Meeting, where I had been asked to speak out of what has been called "the great tradition," concerning the rumored "end of metaphysics." It is important, however, to notice what followed the colon in the chosen theme: "the question of foundations." For metaphysics has been pronounced dead several times already, according to different autopsies: by scepticism, nominalism, empiricism, and by at least two versions of positivism, the one prescribed by Auguste (...) Comte and the other more recently mandated by the Vienna Circle. Indeed, death notices of metaphysics have become traditional in "the great tradition" itself; so that these recurrent obituaries disclose something of the very nature of metaphysics. While several of these morbid diagnoses continue to play a role-since in these matters nothing ever seems to quite wholly die once it gets itself born--there is a new angel of death on the scene. It is Nietzsche, purged of the metaphysics that had allegedly infected him, a revisionist or at least a revised Nietzsche, a neo-Nietzsche who has rallied an impressive number of lively mourners to the wake. Should the notices prove premature, however, the question will then resolve itself into: "Who will bury whom?". (shrink)

It is not usual to associate Hegel’s dialectic with the philosophical trend called nominalism. Nevertheless, nominalism plays an indispensable role in the modern philosophical developments leading up to Hegel’s Science of Logic. Even more, it continues its career within that logic. It would be simply absurd to label Hegel a nominalist, but the challenge posed by nominalism is not simply opposed by Hegel, i.e., it is not opposed without qualification. Of course, one never expects Hegel to confront anything directly. Instead, (...) the nominalist strain is integrated into the movement of his thought in order to be overcome by speculative reason. But what is this overcoming, this sublation? It seems to be the ambitious attempt of thought to cancel out a thought-content, while somehow preserving it and at the same time transforming it. This very ambition has led critics, such as Heidegger and Derrida, to home in on what they take to be a major point of vulnerability in the Hegelian drive for system. (shrink)

It is said of St. Thomas Aquinas’ teacher, St. Albert the Great, that he grew forgetful towards the end of his life and began to say mass for himself as though he were dead: quasi defunctus est. The fact that he was one of the most learned persons of Western Europe during his life-time did not save him from a pathetic loss of memory. The story illustrates a bitter knowledge known from time immemorial: that age may steal away one’s innermost (...) possessions. Of course, it has always been known too that a blow upon the head in the prime of life may rob a person of consciousness and leave him or her permanently impaired. To this general wisdom about the fragility of conscious life, researchers have lately added an increasingly complex and precise knowledge of just how the brain and its various regions participate in our conscious life. So that this new detailed knowledge fills out the ancient recognition of the soul’s reliance upon its physical base; it gives new weight to that dependence, and confirms the human spirit’s immersion in matter. And if it does not quite overwhelm us with the intimacy of the alliance between soul and body, it bids fair to change the tone and degree of our awareness of that connection, so that the claim to the soul’s immortality is likely nowadays to fall upon less receptive ears. Indeed, talk about the soul sounds strange to the ears of many present-day psychologists and philosophers. And even Christian theologians write copiously today about the resurrection of Christ and of the dead, but little about the immortality of the soul. (shrink)

"In Nature's infinite book of secrecy A little I can read." William Shakespeare Environmental degradation. Globalization. The closure of our public life to the transcendent dimensions of human existence. For esteemed philosopher Kenneth Schmitz these are the by-products of modernity and post-modernity. But The Recovery of Wonder is not a denunciation of modern philosophy. Instead, it seeks to point out what needs to be rethought at fundamental levels of our understanding and to show clearly how contemporary social concerns can be (...) illuminated by a new look at the history of philosophy. While acknowledging the significant gains modernity and post-modernity offer Western civilization in the areas of liberty and knowledge, Schmitz sees in their arguments a superficiality that does not "bite to the bone." In The Recovery of Wonder he proposes we approach the world as a gift in order to regain the sense of wonder Shakespeare so eloquently recognized. (shrink)

PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT has two broad phases: the first is that of infancy, childhood, and adolescence; the second is that of our continuing development as adults. Without excluding the former, I wish to concentrate upon the latter in order to describe what I will argue is a spiritual form of life in the individual human being. Becoming in the order of human personhood arises out of a dynamic source that is not easy to name with accuracy. It has been called the (...) "psyche," or "subjectivity," or "personality," and sometimes "the human spirit," though the latter term often remains rather too vague for philosophical purposes. Aristotle has said that the fruits of understanding come with getting the name right. What, then, is the proper name with which to designate the dynamic principle at the center of the movement of life that is appropriate to the human person? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE GOD OF LOVE * KENNETH L. SCHMITZ John Paul II Institute Washington, D.C. GOD WITHOUT BEING introduces English readers to a body of work by the French philosopher, Jean-Luc Marion. It has caused no little stir among French philosophers and theologians. For it is a remarkable book, frequently brilliant, sometimes dazzling, often original, more often still, troubling. Troubling, not so much by its conclusions as by the means (...) used to arrive at them, and the implications suggested by those means. The book begins with phenomenology, passes on to ontology in the Heideggerian vein, and culminates in a theology of agapic love. I almost wrote that it passes through Heideggerian ontology to agape, but that is what is most troubling about the book. One puts it down wondering, despite critical reassurances from the author, whether the analysis has ever freed itself from the shaping hand of Heideggerian ontology, or has done so at too high a cost. It is not that the author accepts Heidegger; indeed his critical exegesis is perhaps the most brilliant part of a very striking book. But nonetheless, Heidegger's stamp is so heavy upon the analysis, his presuppositions so ingrained in it, that the conclusions themselves, while expressly "beyond" Heidegger, nevertheless trail his ontology in their train. In a preface written nearly ten years after the French book first appeared, Marion reassures his English readers (perhaps with a touch of unintended condescension) that God exists. In- *Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being. Hors-Texte, tr. by Thos. A. Carlson. \Vith a foreword by David Tracy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991; being a translation of Dieu sans l'etre: Hors-Texte, Librairie Artheme Fayard, 1982. 495 496 KENNETH L. SCHMITZ deed, his argument is meant to tell against any ordinary atheism, and his exposition of the Eucharist glows with Catholic piety. There can be no doubt, too, that his exegesis often opens up surprising senses of the Biblical texts, such as those of the Wisdom literature in the Old Testament and the letters of St. Paul in the New. The first chapter carries out a phenomenology of the difference between the idol and the icon. The idol is not false or illusory in any ordinary sense. On the contrary, its luminescence is an actual reflection of the divine. The fulguration catches the human eye, mind and spirit as it gazes at the embodied manifestation in wonder. But, instead of letting the fulguration measure the import of the disclosure, the gaze stops at the luminous idol and freezes the divine light within the scope of the worshipper's merely human gaze, interest and aim. The aim, then, provides the measure and meaning of the light, referring it back to the human intention. And so the idol divides the fulguration, retaining for the gaze what is so extraordinarily visible, while it lets go what is unattainable through its effort and on its own terms. Marion expresses this remainder by the neologism: invisable, from viser: to aim. We have here an initial insistence upon the inability to reduce God to a concept. The analysis exposes the logic of a first level of idolatry, idolatry which takes form as the regionalization of the divine. Thus, to choose a portentous example, Nietzsche unmasks the regional " God of morality" proclaimed by Kant and other modern thinkers. It is quite the reverse with the icon. The luminosity of the icon presents its visage to the believer who receives it as the face that endows the visible with the inexhaustible invisibility of God. It is of signal importance to Marion's thesis, however, that the invisible is not thereby offered to human sight or conception, but rather that the visible features of the icon ask to be transgressed, giving way-neither to the sight of sense or mind-but to veneration ( 19). For the iconic intention is not determined by any human gaze, but rather by the mysterious initiative of the true revealing God. Whereas the idol shines with a radiance bor- THE GOD OF LOVE 497 rowed from the divine but confined within the limits of the human gaze, the icon glows with an alien glance that stems from its divine... (shrink)

In one of his earlier essays he offered a sketch of what a philosophy ought to accomplish. It includes elements which have remained constant throughout thirty years of philosophical activity. He wrote then that the task of philosophy remains what it has always been: to "explain, not explain away, the world we all in some sense know." Prodded by the irritant of science and helped with the newly powerful instrument of modern logic, philosophy must build a system of explanation without (...) reduction. His later philosophy vigorously defends non-scientific ways of understanding and resists any capitulation of philosophy to science or logic, but both remain important for an adequate philosophy. The history of philosophy becomes perhaps even more important as time passes. PIP is taken up with long and intricate reflections on philosophers of every time and sort. In his early sketch, nevertheless, the history of philosophy is said to be valuable for avoiding past mistakes. The five errors he singles out have as their counterpart the embryonic concerns of the modal philosophy. (shrink)

Three distinct objects of attention - nature, culture, and God - call for the recognition of three distinct modes of truth. A single code of rational discourse - the preferred one today is that of the empirio-mathematical study of nature - is not enough to preserve the diversity of meanings called for by the investigation of culture and religion. In particular, the human subject stands in relation to the three objects of enquiry respectively as “door-keeper,” “participant,” and “respondent.” Recognition of (...) the analogous unity of rational discourse is prelude to releasing the spheres of culture and religion from subjection to the epistemology that functions in the natural sciences and frees them for investigation on their own terms. (shrink)

THE OPTION proposed by Weiss's Modes of Being is between a radical monism which denies a plurality of beings and a radical pluralism which demands the imperfection of God. The dilemma is stated thus: Either there is a perfect God, as the Hebraic-Christian tradition holds, and no other actual beings; or there are other actual beings and, at best, an imperfect God. Weiss resolves the dilemma in favour of a radical pluralism and a supreme but imperfect God. Multiple proofs secure (...) a God who is one of four interrelated modes of Being. To propose an absolutely perfect God would be to make it "impossible to acknowledge the independent reality and excellence of anything else." Quite simply, if God were all that is, there could be no more; but there is more, and so God is not all that is. (shrink)