{52} (cont'd)

2) The being of human reality. A) First, let us say what being is as differentiated from reality. For this, let us remember what I presented at the beginning of this study: everything real is intrinsically and formally respective to everything {53} else. This “else” refers to the other things which constitute the cosmos. But “else” is not only the other things but is also —and most importantly— the moment of reality itself, be there other real things or not. Reality itself, as such, is respective because in itself it is open; the impression of reality of many things apprehended unitarially is physically and numerically the same. Therefore, the moment of reality is in each real thing a moment open in itself as reality. And precisely because of this, the reality of each real thing is intrinsically and formally respective. Nothing is real except in respect to all other reality as reality. Each real thing is “its” reality. In this respectivity is founded the unity of all the real. The unity of respectivity with respect to the notes of the thing, is the unity we call “cosmos”. Now, the unity of respectivity of everything real, not with respect to its notes, but with respect to its moment of reality, is what constitutes the world. World is not the total set of real things, but the unity of respectivity of reality qua reality. It is the unity of every form and mode of reality qua reality. Because of this, I pointed out, even though there were but one real thing, this single one thing would be formally worldly just because reality is an open moment.

Now, real things as real are in the world. In virtue of this, they are actually present in it. To be actually present, as far as it is an “is”, is what constitutes actuality as differentiated from actuity (actuidad). The actuality of the real in the world is what, to my way of thinking, constitutes being. Being is not the same as reality. If we consider the properties or notes which constitute, for example, silver, {54} these properties are not the being of silver but the argentuous reality itself, in its form and mode of reality. And the form and mode of reality are not being. If silver were able to speak it would say, “With all these real properties, I am really this way in the world”. This is being: the “this way in the world”.

Classical philosophy said that reality is the supreme mode of being, the real being, the esse reale. But this is not the case. It is not the case that there is reality because there is being; rather, there is being because there is reality. Therefore, there is no esse reale, but realitas in essendo, “reality in being”. Because of this, one cannot talk about the substantive being of something, because being by itself has no substantivity. There is no substantive being, but only being of the substantive. To understand this, let us enunciate some of the characteristics of being.

a) Being is actuality, mere actuality: it does not consist in the presence or presentiality of the real in the world; but in “being” present qua being actually. To be is worldly actuality. Reality, on the other hand, before being actual and precisely in order to be so, begins by being a system of notes in activity, in the character of act.

b) Actuality is founded on reality; being is founded on reality. Being is, consequently, Posterior to reality, and has the character of posteriority. All actuality is posterior to activity. To be sure, this is not a chronological posteriority; that would be absurd. It is a structural posteriority: being actually founded in reality.

c) This actuality is actually founded in reality, but reality is not extraneous to it, nor to being, because the difference between being and reality does not mean that being is something like a mere adjunct, more or less accidental to reality. That would be completely {55} absurd. Reality is the de suyo. Now, a real thing is de suyo worldly. Being therefore belongs to it really, belongs to it de suyo: it really “is”. It is just “reality being”. The gerund was originally a present participle. When making of reality a mode of being, philosophy since Parmenides thought that the real is formally “entity”: this was the entification of reality. And I think that this is unacceptable. Nothing is primarily entity. Not even God himself is primarily the Supreme Being: He is Supreme Reality. What is primary is the reality. There is being only because there is reality. Real things certainly “are”, but they are because they are “real”. Reality is not esse, but in essendo, “reality being”. “Reality being” expresses the complete character of what constitutes a real thing whose being is founded in the moment of reality. “Reality being” is not the same as “entity”. Something is an entity when it becomes subsumed in being; therefore, each entity is “a being”. But when we speak of ”reality being”, reality does not become subsumed in being, but rather the being is founded on reality because the real is present in the world by the mere fact, and only by the mere fact, of having reality. This being present is just the gerundial participle “being” (siendo). It is not a cursive present, which to my way of thinking, is a present of actuality and not of actuity. Therefore, “reality being” is radically different from entity. We shall see almost immediately the capital importance of this observation.

This granted, we have already conceptualized the form and mode of human reality in and by itself: the animal of realities and the personal animal. Now we must conceptualize in what the actuality of this form and {56} mode of reality in the world consists, that is, What is the being of human reality, What is the being of man?

B) The being of man. The being of human reality is the worldly actualization of a personal substantivity, that is, of his person as mode of reality, relatively absolute. Here “person” denotes not only personhood but also personality. Person is the concrete unity of personhood according to the personality; it is the person modally configured. This person is, as mode of reality, a reality relatively absolute. And so, the worldly actuality of this relatively absolute reality we call “I”. The “I” is not human reality. The “I” is the worldly actuality of that relatively absolute reality, that is, the “I” is the being of the person, the being of the relatively absolute reality. The “I” does not consist in being subject of its acts, but rather is a mode of being, a mode of worldly actuality of the relatively absolute. It is not the case that I am relatively absolute, but on the contrary, that the relatively absolute “is” I. The subject of its acts is not I; though perhaps improperly utilizing these predicative phrases, I shall rather say that “I” is not subject, but predicate: this reality am I. This is what we express when we say “I myself”. This is the being of the person. Because of this, the “I” is the being of the relatively absolute, and can be called “relatively absolute being”.

Man has this absolute mode of being even in the most modest forms of confrontation with the real, because with each thing a person possesses himself; in this consists life. Consequently, each thing imposes a mode of auto-possession, a mode of configuring one’s own relatively absolute reality. By virtue of this, that configured mode {57} is a worldly way of being relatively absolute. As open to the apprehension of the real as real, I have to do something, which before becoming a person, would have been impossible for me. Until now, as an animal, I was hungry and would eat an apple. Now, on the other hand, I sense both hunger and the apple as realities. And eating the apple I “myself” eat an apple. This moment of the “myself” is an actualization of my reality with respect to all reality as such; it is a mode of worldly actualization of my personal reality, the first manner of formal openness, openness in “medial” form, openness to the absolute of being. But a moment arrives in which this obscure “myself” acquires a more precise and strong character, and my substantive reality does not act in a medial, but in an active form. The being thus determined is now not only a “myself” but something more radical: it is a “my”. It is my hunger, my apple, my act of eating, etc. Now the person actualizes absolute being in a worldly way, in a more express and radical form: I am “my” with respect to everything else. But matters do not end here. A moment arrives when the “my” acquires a new and even more precise character: I am not just “my”, but something else, I am I. Here, my personal being actualizes itself with maximum explicitude inasmuch as my reality is relatively absolute. This is the fullness of determining in a worldly fashion my relatively absolute being.

And thus, “myself, my, I” (me, mí, Yo) are three distinct ways of worldly actualization of my substantive reality. These three are not merely distinct. In the first place, each is founded upon the previous one. I could not “be my” reality unless that were founded on the I am “myself”. I am my own, qua being, with respect to everything that “I myself am”, so to speak. Similarly, no one could be an I without being a {58} “my” and founded on being this. That is why the expression “I myself” has been created. In the second place, not only is each of these ways founded on the previous one, but this previous way is preserved in the next as an intrinsic and formal moment of its own character. The “I” is always but the “I of my”, of a “my which is itself”. A potiori, I will call the being of my substantive reality I.

The I is not only the being of my personal substantivity; in addition this I has, at each instant, a particular figure. This figure is just what until now we have been calling “personality”. Personality is not only the figure of reality but at one and the same time, the figure of absolute being. I am I and the mode of how I am I is what personality is. For this reason I mentioned above that personality is not a matter of psychism, but is a metaphysical question. To understand this let us take as an example the case of repentance. It is usually said about a person who has committed a crime and repents of it that he “has erased the crime”. No, he has not erased the crime; how could it be possible to erase it? The crime had a reality and not even Divine Omnipotence –except for some nominalists–can make it such that what happened never was. The crime continues “being” as a moment of my reality. In what does repentance consist? In others not imputing it to me? That would be an act of forgiveness, it is not repentance. Repentance consists in incorporating the past reality into a different figure of being. I am the criminal who has committed a crime, but now I am so, repentantly; I am a thing which I was not when I committed the crime. Repentance aims not exactly towards the mode of reality, but towards the mode of being of the criminal act.

{59} From this it follows that the I is neither a logical nor a metaphysical subject, but purely and simply the worldly actualization of the personal selfness. That is why it must be said against the whole of idealism that not only is reality not a position of the I, but that on the contrary the I is posited by reality. It is my own substantive reality which posits (if one wishes to talk about positing) the worldly actuality of my person, the one that posits the I.

The I is not what is primary; what is primary is the reality. And precisely because of that the I flows back over my own reality, and constitutes that unity of being and reality which we call “I myself”. This is precisely the “reality being”.

We must now confront the structure of this unity of the “human reality being”.
3) Unity of human being and reality. We have examined human reality and afterwards the worldly actuality of this reality, its being culminating in I. I is the being of human reality. But to this being, to this I, naturally, human reality itself is not a stranger. Human reality “being” (siendo) is man being I. To enter more directly into the theme of this book, I shall refer in the future not to the reality and being of man separately, but rather to the human reality being. And to avoid complications I shall call I, not only the being of human reality, but this reality formally being, that is to say, to human reality “I-ized”, if I may be permitted the use of this barbarous expression for just one instant. Unless explicitly mentioned I, and whatever I may say about the I, will refer to this unity of reality and being, to the human reality being.

This is not a mere conceptual problem, but a problem posed by the physical structure of human reality because man is relatively {60} absolute reality: absolute not only with respect to things, but above all, with respect to other personal realities if they exist. Indeed these other absolutes exist, not only in fact, but exist necessarily in virtue of an essential character of human substantivity as such: its specifity. What is a species? How are persons co-determined in the species?

A) A species is not the real correlate of a definition. For classical philosophy, species is a moment of unity of multiple realities. The starting point would be the multiplicity of animals of realities. There would be a species because there are many men. But species is not that. If it were so, what we call “species” would only be a natural class. And a species is much more than class. As it happens, this concept of species is merely conceptive. But “in reality” it is an intrinsic and formal moment that belongs to each human animal, a moment in accordance with which it multiplies itself. The species does not unify, but pluralizes. The species only exists “speciating”. Because of this there is not merely a specific multiplicity, but a constituting multiplication. This is just what we call “genesis”. Human reality is constitutively genetic. And in this genetic moment consists what is specific about reality, and consequently the very principle of the co-determination of persons, of the constitution of the I of each person.

This specific moment does not pluralize itself in all the notes of human reality in their detail, but only according to a schema of structural replication. This schema is a constitutive moment of each animal (I leave aside the non-animal living beings, which do not concern us here). This genetic multiplication in accordance with a schema is what formally constitutes a phylum. A species then is {61} the phyletic unity of the individuals. To be of each particular species is to belong to such-and-such particular phylum. Realities which are not phyletic do not constitute species.

The schema, we see, is not a moment added to my reality; rather, my own reality involves some characteristics which constitute the schema of a possible replication: this is the genetic code. Whence follows three important consequences.

a) Since each replicate is an animal of realities, it follows that the replicate is eo ipso a personal animal; that is to say, my schema is a schema of a personal animal, of “another” human person.

b) Since the schema is not something marginal to substantivity, but is a constitutive moment of it and thus of its own life, it follows that my substantivity is constitutively and vitally poured out from itself to other persons. The “others” are not something added to me but something towards which I am constitutively poured from myself; I am de suyo schematically the other persons.

c) As a consequence of this, my own reality, in a schematic, but real mode, is affected by its own schema and also by other persons. Thanks to the schematic structure of my substantivity the “others” flow back over myself. This flowing back takes place in two respects. In the first place, by reason of the replicated organism: the schema affects me as schema of another psycho-organic organism, the psycho-organic organism of the generated being. But in second place, the schema affects me by its presence with respect to me. The schema is not only a schema of psycho-organic constitution, but at one and the same time is a schema of corporeal actuality. The “other” is schematically not only another animal of realities, {62} another person, but something corporeally present to me. The schema is at one and the same time a schema of organic function and schema of somatic function. Whence it follows that each person has two sides. On one side is a reality which is “his own”, determined as absolute with respect to every reality as such. But on the other side, my person is a reality whose absolute character is in some way co-determined by flowing back, by other persons, by other absolutes. My psycho-organic reality, when determining my absolute reality being, when determining my I, determines it not only with respect to “the” reality, but also with respect to other relatively absolutes. How?