{83} (cont’d)

II. The object of metaphysics and the idea of entity

We can consider the object of metaphysics from two levels, from the order of knowledge and from the order of reality.

In the first place, from the order of knowledge.

St. Thomas does not doubt to place himself directly and without question on the conceptive concept of human understanding. To understand is to form concepts; to understand intellectively is to form concepts of things. This is an idea completely {84} alien to the Greek world, among other reasons because the Greek never had the term or notion of “concept”. This has a Latin origin and probably goes back to Cicero who perhaps was inspired by the Stoics; at any rate, up to the time of Aristotle it did not exist.

It is the case, then, of a conceptive order. Facing Plato St. Thomas will tell us (apparently repeating Aristotle) that every conceptive order is the product of an abstraction (aphaíresis). Every abstraction seems to be a merely negative operation. Not to consider certain aspects of things and only consider others, is not only true, but also without it there would not be any abstraction. But the problem is much more serious because in that apparent negativity —putting aside certain characteristics of things— what we do is to positively constitute the pure object for the viewing by intelligence upon which that act of the intelligence is going to rest. In that sense, abstraction is something eminently positive and that abstraction, according to St. Thomas, may attain several forms.

In the first place, there can be an abstraction where we prescind from the individuality proper to each of the things that constitute the world. If we only paid attention to individualities St. Thomas tells us, there would never be knowledge (scientia), but something else —we do not know what— and that would not be science. For this reason we have to prescind, we have to make abstraction of the individual characteristics of things, and then, what remains before our eyes is precisely a sensible reality with its individual characteristics removed. That remaining sensible reality can be the object of science, what St. Thomas and the medieval in general called “Physics”. Let us remember that “physics” for a Greek was the theory of entity in motion, a thing that {85} St. Thomas will surely repeat, but here there is a small conceptual purification. While for a Greek what essentially constitutes physical knowledge (epistéme physiké) is entity in motion (ón kinetón) insofar as “in motion”, for a medieval this remains true, but now it is put on a secondary level. What is now taken as the first level is the sensible substance insofar as sensible substance, which is something quite removed from what later has been called “physics”. This is a distance that has been difficult to cover. Saying it in general, what the ancient world, the entire medieval world, and even the beginning of the modern world have considered in the motion of the cosmos, is the situation of that which is in motion. In other words, they have considered motion, as a “state” of whatever is in motion, and that is why we have “physics” as a science of entity in motion. But present day physics completely ignores motion considered as a state of something in motion, and the only relevant thing considered is the “functional” relationship of one reality with respect to another. Motion, considered as “function”, and not as a “state”, is what is going to characterize physics from its early babblings in Galileo to the culmination in our days. Here then, we have a first type of abstraction.

There is a second type of abstraction, apparently much deeper. It consists in prescinding within the sensible substance of all its qualitative elements —that it may be hot, cold, etc.— and retain purely and simply the fact that it may be a quantitative substance. It would then be, not the sensible quantity (which would be the one considered in physics), but the intelligible quantity, proper to mathematics, something quite remote from what modern mathematics is. How can there be a pretense, although it may be repeated clumsily and blunderingly in the textbooks, that mathematics is the science of quantity? {86} Modern mathematics has nothing to do with the science of quantity, it is a science of abstract sets, whether of quantity or not. It is also repeated blunderingly that geometry is the science of continuous quantity and arithmetic the science of discreet quantity, which is intrinsically false. In the first place, because there are non-continuative geometries (non-Archimedean geometry), and in second place, because there is a numerical continuum. The introduction of the irrational number, the square root of 2, confers to the field of numbers a strict continuity. Therefore, that difference between continuous quantity and discreet quantity does not exist. But in addition modern mathematics, directly, has nothing to do with quantity. It is possible that the elements that compose a set may be quantities and it is evident that there are sets of numbers; but there are also sets of polynomials, of functions, etc., that by themselves are not defined by their reference to quantity. A set is defined if a univocal criterion is given so that considering a particular thing, it may be possible to say if that object has a certain property or not; if it has, it falls in the set, if not, it falls outside the set. That the property may or not may be quantitative is something completely accidental and, in addition, quite limited. Modern mathematics has nothing to do with the quantity the medieval considered.

There is still a third type of abstraction, which goes much deeper. If we prescind from any quantity, sensible or intelligible, we are simply left with substance insofar as substance. Then we have something much more abstract that is precisely entity, the ens; what remains before the intelligence is entity. Through the abstraction of the singular individual notes and of any sensible and intelligible quantitative consideration, the idea of entity is constituted before our eyes, of {87} that which is insofar as it is. After the object of metaphysics is defined, we cannot but inquire as to the characteristics of an object constituted this way.

In the first place, from the cognitive point of view, entity is for St. Thomas the highest abstraction, the most abstract thing that may be given. That is why it is justified that, from his point of view, St. Thomas may say that the considerations de prima philosophia, the trans-physics, are the magis communia, not only the “most”, but the maximum common. The idea of entity represents the maximum abstraction, always from a hypothesis that should have been questioned. Is it certain that the first thing intelligence does is to form concepts?

In the second place, and going deeper on that line, not only is the concept of entity for St. Thomas the most abstract that we can imagine, but it also has a radical primacy. St. Thomas says that in the concept of entity all the other concepts of understanding are resolved. Indeed, to conceive is only to conceive what this is and what that is; in “what is”, in entity, all the other concepts of understanding are resolved. Nevertheless, the concept of entity will be primary if the primary function of the intellect is to frame concepts, but what if that were not so? I say this not to criticize St. Thomas, but to continue to point out that our title —“Problems of Metaphysics”— really enunciates problems and metaphysics is not like a sluggish block that is just there, to be taken or be left alone.

In the third place, since every concept represents a unitary moment with respect to conceived things —for example, the concept of man referred to the human species covers all possible men in that species— we have to ask, what type of unity does the concept of entity have?

{88} St. Thomas accepts a favorite idea of Aristotle, that being is not a genus. That is to say, just as life taken as a genus is divided into different types of living things —vegetal, animal and men— and men can be determined by means of a division through the properties that distinguish them, this cannot be done at all in the case of entity. Simply because in order to make it “differ” there would have to be a difference with respect to entity. But then, that difference must not be in the entity, because if it were, it would have been something added. To the idea of entity nothing can be added. The supreme genera to which Aristotle refers, the categories —substance and the nine accidents— are not in any way “species” of beings, but primary and radical diversity of beings. There is no difference, there is nothing that would respond to the verb to di-ffer, that is, to take a common point and break it into two parts. They are not, then, divisions, but as a scholastic would say in a very graphic and very exact way, primo diversa, a primary and radical diversity. Therefore, the concept of entity does not have a generic unity, but is a separate concept with respect to the rest of the concepts.

This does not mean that the concept of entity may not be realized in all things that are. On the contrary, each one of the things that are is resolved one way or the other in entity. This means that what we call entity is something realized in each and every one of all things and furthermore, it does not differentiate specifically or generically, some against others; it is in all of them, but in a certain way occurring in the depth and over all of them. This “being-there-in-and-over” is the exact sense of “to trans-cend”. The concept of entity has a unity that is not generic, but transcendental; it is found realized in all the things that are, in all entities, but {89} is not limited to any of them. That is why St. Thomas will say that while the species and the supreme genera are “divided” into subordinate species, with respect to entity no division is given, but a “contraction”. The concept of entity is not divided into species of entities and supreme genera, but contracts in its own way in each of these supreme genera; it is a conceptual structure of contraction and not a conceptual structure of division. The unity of entity, therefore, is not generic; it is a transcendental unity.

The question is, then, in what does that which is proper to a transcendental unity consist? Here St. Thomas will appeal to the idea of analogy in Aristotle. Let us be clear that although the idea of analogy is found in multiple locations in Aristotle, the expression “analogy of entity” (Sp. analogía del ente) is never found in him. Let us not make an issue of this now, but of the points in which St. Thomas is going to make precise and outline the Aristotelian thought.

We are not going to take up lengthy discussions, which the Thomists and non-Thomists alike might expect concerning what analogy is. We shall limit ourselves to something simple and fundamental. The fact is, actually, that the content of this concept is in all things that are, but in each one of them in its own way; this is precisely the idea of analogy. Perhaps a bizarre Thomist might say that this is the analogy of attribution and not of proportion; but let us not deal with fancy, the important one is the first. It is the case of concepts that are realized in each thing, but in a different way in each. If not in each taken individually, at least in the different supreme genera. The way a quality is entity, a quantity is entity, a substance is entity, and a relation is entity. These are entities in the sense they answer to the question “what is it” and the universal concept {90} of entity, but in each case contracted to a mode of being. Therefore, by virtue of that, the concept of entity has a non-generic unity, but rather a transcendental one and in addition it is analogical. The idea of entity is the supreme abstraction in which are resolved, in a transcendental and analogical way, all the rest of the concepts of understanding.

As we can see, St. Thomas has been slowly and progressively purifying the ideas of Aristotle and although this task was not exclusively his, we can concentrate the exposition on him. However, all this is nothing but something that affects the order of concepts.

Due to this, in a second step, we must ask from within the order of reality, what is it in things that responds to that moment we conceptively understand in the concept of entity?

Here matters become more complicated because now it is not the case of the concept of being, but of the entity of each thing. I use the term “entity” to deliberately avoid that difference between being (Sp. el ser) and entity (Sp. el ente) that has been canonized since Heidegger. This would not be important if we were dealing with the philosophy of Heidegger, but once again it is the problem of trying to pour a modern philosophy over a preceding one. When Husserl published Phenomenology (Sp. Fenomenología)¹ and “essences” were mentioned there, the Scholastics said they knew about them, and then phenomenology appeared as a purified and psychological version —or transcendental— of what essences are in Scholasticism. When Scheler publishes his Ethic of Values² {91} and says that values are objective, again the Scholastics point out that they had defended it with the only difference of referring to the “good”; again values are poured into Scholasticism. Heidegger tells us (Sein und Seiendes) there is a difference between to be (Sp. el ser) and entity (Sp. el ente), and it is alleged that this is what we mean when we affirm that “to be” is one thing and “entity” another. But this cannot be admitted; if that distinction Heidegger proposes had existed —as he assumes— since Parmenides, the history of philosophy would have been different, and the assumption cannot be accepted that from Parmenides to our times philosophy has been doing nothing but misunderstand that distinction.

To avoid these incongruities let us refer to the entity of things. We do not talk here about the conceptive order, that is, about the order of the concept of entity, but of the real and effective entity of each thing. To do this we have to ask three questions.

In the first place, What does St. Thomas understand by entity?
In the second place, Which are the characteristics of entity?
In the third place, What relationship is there between these characteristics and the entity of which they are characteristics? A question that is fully justified, since nothing can be added to being.


First question. What does St. Thomas understand by entity?

St. Thomas apparently does nothing but repeat some ideas of Aristotle, but with an important inflexion; in a concise manner St. Thomas tells us that “entity is everything whose act is to be” (est ens id cujus actus est esse)³. This is a completely alien idea to Aristotle, because he referred to being (Sp. ser) {92} in act, but he never said that being (Sp. ser) was the act of a thing. In addition, what St. Thomas may understand by “act” is always subject to question.

Be that as it may, St. Thomas says that entity is anything whose act is to be. But then we must ask, what is that id, that something whose act is to be and seems to be outside this to be? Is it nothing perhaps? Because then to be is not act. Is it something? Because then to be is not the ultimate and radical. St. Thomas considers things precisely insofar as “entities”; this is what for many years and in many seminars I have been calling the entification of reality, which subsumes and articulates reality within the concept of entity. The importance of this will be seen further down. The entification of reality consists in believing that the primary and radical of things is that they are “entities”, which supposes that the primary and radical of things is “to be”. But what then if this is not so? What happens with the languages that lack the verb “to be” or with those languages that, although having it make little use of it, as it happens in the ancient Semitic languages? There is always a problem here.

Nonetheless, St. Thomas does not question it and just accepts res as synonym for ens. In this sense, St. Thomas has taken things (and here I give the term “thing” a completely innocuous meaning) as “entities”, in a radical entification of reality.


Second question. What characteristics does entity have?

This entification carries certain characteristics with respect to things that we might quickly enumerate.

In the first place, we may consider entity absolutely, that is, taken in itself, any kind of entity as far as entity. If we consider it in an affirmative, positive way, {93} every entity is an ens that has an essence, a quiddity. The term “essence” has a very concrete and precise sense that has nothing to do with what I, modestly, clumsily and probably ignorantly call “essence” in my book⁴; here “essence” means the essential content that every entity has as a quiddity, insofar as entity intrinsically considered.

But we can consider it in a negative way and then, together with that res that the essence would be, we have what we call the unity, the unum. St. Thomas says that this consideration is negative because, purifying once more the thought of Aristotle, he refuses to take the problem of unity through the way by which Plato took it. Plato thought that the one opposes the many and designed that fantastic dialectic of the one and the many, which culminates in the Parmenides and the Sophist. Aristotle never traveled on this line and understood that the essential is not precisely that there may be other one’s, but that one may be another one, which is a different question. And that this “one” of the “other one” may be constituted by its internal indivisibility since if it were divisible we would not have one thing, but two or several. The one is a transcendental characteristic, but negative, of entity. St. Thomas will repeat here with Aristotle that there are many classes of units, that there are accidental units, collective units, etc.; what is interesting to him is the unity per se, that which constitutes the one. For example, in the case of he human species, the internal unity of animality and rationality is not the same as the unity there is between Socrates and music, since Socrates might not have been a musician, while the unity of species is intrinsic and formal.

{94} But if we take entity not in itself, but relative to others, then we also find a double consideration, positive and negative. Negatively would consist in saying every entity, as we have just seen, is a quid, a quidditas; but is other than the others, is quid aliud, it is aliquid, which is just the origin of the term “something”. To be “something” does not mean to be simply res, but also to be something different than the other. As we shall see further on, this poses the problem of finding if all these characteristics that are flamboyantly called transcendental are really such strictly speaking. Because, can it be said of God that He may be something in this sense with respect to the world? We shall leave this question in suspense for the time being.

We may also consider this positively. In that case the positive relativity of an entity with respect to another is a transcendental respectivity since it has to be established on the line of entity insofar as entity. St. Thomas says there are only two possible types of this. One, the entity that because of its own entity is called to apprehend every entity by the mere fact that it is, this is the verum, intelligence. The verum mentioned here is not the verum logicum —that is to say, it is not the case of true knowledge—, but of the intrinsic and formal condition through which every entity in principle is terminus of a verum, of an intelligence. Something similar can be said with respect to the will. Entity can be in agreement with the will, not in the sense of truth, but in the sense that every entity is intrinsically “that which all desire”, as St. Thomas says repeating the first phrase of the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle. In other words, the entity is the one that has in itself the very reason for desirability.

The verum and the bonum would be {95} transcendental properties or characteristics of being referred precisely to intelligence and will, and therefore, to that psyché of which Aristotle said that in a certain way it can be everything, a phrase that St. Thomas repeats at this moment, “anima quae est quoddammodo omnia”⁵. Since this all (omnia) is such on the line of entity qua entity, it means that this concordance in the order of truth and in the order of goodness is a strictly transcendental concordance.

We now have five transcendental characteristics of entity: its res or quiddity, its unity, that it is something (aliquid), the truth and the goodness.

Yet, this is crowded with significant difficulties, as scholasticism realized. Thus, for example, to the concept of entity as such definitely belongs that there be no multiplicity of entities; then, in what measure can it be said that these notes are simply transcendental? In the best of cases they would not be such absolutely, but only hypothetically. In the second place, is it true that every entity is by itself intrinsically intelligible? It depends on what may be understood by entity, because not even the intelligence of Christ has been able to have a comprehensive intellection of his own divine filiation, something that only the Word was able to have insofar as God, and this was quite well known to St. Thomas. With this, we begin to see that even in this new horizon, those things that first appear neatly outlined do not cease to present problems.


Third question. What is the relationship between these characteristics and entity?

We have already mentioned that nothing can be added to entity, {96} unless from within the very entity. Assuming we have an entity of a particular genus, we can make all kinds of divisions and subdivisions, all the complications in the world. But to entity as such we cannot add anything from the outside because, that which could be added would be “nothing”.

From inside the metaphysics of St. Thomas one observes that these characteristics of entity, regardless of what they may be, are founded on the entity; if it were not by reason of the entity, we would not even be able to say anything about transcendental characteristics. These transcendental characteristics, precisely because they are founded on the entity, accompany every being that exists and is real, cirumeunt omne ens qua ens. Because of this, I have taken the liberty of translating with another root that same term and call those characteristics “trans-fundamenting” (Sp. trans-fundentes⁶). Entity and its characteristics trans-fundament all entities that exist, and this translation is not so arbitrary because, referring to a different theological problem, St. Thomas says that God is “a profundens first cause to every entity and its differences”⁷. Therefore, these characteristics are founded on the entity, and because of that they are trans-fundamenting.

Furthermore, these characteristics are not added to entity. How could we possibly add them? Where could they possibly come from? From non-being? They would be nothing. For this reason St. Thomas makes use of a notion by Aristotle and says that, formally considered, entity and the one are not identical, but “accompany each other”. In this case, Scholasticism has translated the verb akoloutheín by conversio and that way each of these characteristics is convertible (convertitur) with entity. However, inasmuch as it is convertible with entity new difficulties appear because, if all of them are convertible with entity, then all of them {97} could be taken as a starting point. The history of metaphysics from that point on is going to be the carrying out of that possibility.

What does this “conversion” mean specifically for St. Thomas? It is something he never tells us; these characteristics are not characteristics added to entity, but are the entity itself conceived in a more expressive way, according to the different points of view we have been taking. Then, we must ask, is it the case that these transcendental characteristics, insofar as expression, are nothing but “expression”? A resolute scholastic would say that we are facing distinctions of reason cum fundamento in re. But this takes us back to the starting point. And then, what is the fundament based on the entity for this different consideration?

Nonetheless, here surfaces the problematic characteristic of this expression, which directs us again to the function of conceiving and judging. And the question is this, is this function going to be primarily the expression of characteristics, which conceptively man conceives cum fundamento in re with regard to being?

At any rate, as a result we have, in the first place, that the order of being is transcendental. In the second place, that it is transfundamental. In the third place, and referred to a first cause, that it is an order supported by something transcendent. The unity of these three termini is not merely semantic or conceptive, but rather that beyond the purification of Aristotelian concepts, it takes us to something much more important and radical. How does St. Thomas actually see entity in the horizon of nothingness? All the rest is the purified conceptual organon needed to face this question, What is entity in the horizon of nothingness?

St. Thomas has subjected Aristotle to a purifying operation, more or less the same as the purification {98} Aristotle imposed on all the previous philosophy. The metaphysics of St. Thomas begins at the moment he is asked the question, What happens to that entity, conceived that way, rigorously delimited, and seen from the horizon of nothingness? This is the radical and fundamental problem of metaphysics in St. Thomas. Of course, in the very start resides the idea St. Thomas has of what metaphysics is, as we pointed out above. Apparently, he takes the formula of Aristotle; on the one hand, deals with God as separated substance; on the other hand, he deals with the entity as such; and in third place, refers it to the ultimate and supreme cause, which God is. In the end, this means that the metaphysics of St. Thomas consists in seeing how entity, conceived as far as St. Thomas can determine quite rigorously by Aristotle, is referred to God.

We are going to cover this metaphysics of St. Thomas in two parts. In the first, we shall examine the positive vision of entity St. Thomas has. In the second, we shall examine how it is possible to have a true intellection, that is, the type of metaphysical knowledge concerning this entity.

___________________
¹ This was the abbreviated form in which Zubiri always referred to the work of Husserl Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologishen Philosophie, the first volume of which —the only one published by the philosopher while he was alive— came out in 1913.
² Again, it is an abbreviated quotation of the work of M. Scheler Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik, published in 1913-1916.
³ St. Thomas Aquinas, Opusc. 42 De natura generis, ch. 1. Cf., Quodlib. 2, a. 3.
⁴ He refers, obviously, to his book Sobre la esencia, published in 1962.
⁵ Quaestiones disputatae de veritate, q. 4, a. 8.
⁶ [Tr. note: Zubiri neologism]
⁷ “Voluntas divina est intelligenda ut extra ordinem entium existens, velut causa quaedam profundens totum ens et eius differentias”, In Aristotelis libros Peri Hermeneias, L, I, lectio XIV, no. 22.