{285} (cont’d)
b) Intelligence is the capability of apprehending things as real. Yet, these things are “sensed”, and they indeed are, not only by what refers to their content, but also, and principally, by what refers to their very characteristic of reality. Reality is sensed in its own formality of reality. Because of this fact, I have called our intelligence a “sentient intelligence”.
Its act is primarily an intellective sensing. Each sense, besides providing us with its own quality, senses the characteristic of reality in its own particular way. And this is essential. We are not going to enter here into all the details of the question1. In order to simplify and provide an understanding of what I mean, I will put aside the question of internal sensing. For this reason when I refer to “things”, although the example may only refer to external things, what is said is relevant to anything real, either external things or those other things such as mental states of any type. Therefore, I refer to “things” in the widest and most innocuous extent of the term. But even from the point of view of external senses, I limit myself to only a few of them, those, which relate to our problem more directly. Sight senses the reality of things as present in its eídos or figure. But there are other ways of sensing reality. Through the ear sound is actually present, just as figure is present through sight. This sound is the sound of a sonorous thing. But {286} differently from what happens in sight, the sonorous thing is not included presentially in its sonority; it is absent from it. However, not absent simpliciter, because sound remits us to the thing in a special way: by manifesting the real thing to us, but guarding its own reality beyond the sound. This is manifestation or notification. Here reality is sensed as “notice”. Through touch, we obtain the naked presence of reality, but without figure or notice. With other senses (kinesthesia, orientation, muscular sense) we sense reality as something, which is not present or notified, but reality as a “towards” to which we advance or can proceed in a dynamic “tension” from another something. Let me repeat, these are not ways of sensing what real things are, but diverse ways of sensing their very reality: naked presence, figure, notice, tensive direction.
Because of this, in turn, intellection itself has at one and the same time all these different ways of knowing intellectually: it is a sentient intellection. Consequently, it has become imperative to point this out emphatically. On this point philosophical tradition has been growing more and more unilateral. It has molded intellection exclusively upon vision, and as a consequence, all other ways of apprehending reality have been disqualified as a non-intellection. This is the source of the idea that to know intellectively is to re-present, and what is not representable is simply unintelligible. But this is radically false, even dealing with the intellection of what is present. Not everything that is present is representable in its reality. Thus, through tact, naked reality is present to us, but in a very special way, through groping. To grope is not only groping things in reality, but through groping reality itself is present to us “gropingly”. Groping is a way of intellection of what is present in a non-represented form, but insofar as groped. Yet, not every intellection is based on presence, because reality {287} is not just presentiality, neither in a representable nor a groping form. By intellection through the auditive form, we only know intellectively in a manifestative way; this is not direct presentiality. The content of notification is known intellectively as effectively as the figure we see through sight. But we are not limited to this, because we sense and in addition we know the reality of the content of notice intellectively as reality notifying. Notice does not manifest the real thing, but manifests it through the way reality is sensed in sound. The reality of the sonorous is intrinsically (and not just extrinsically) manifestative. Because of this, mere manifestation is a mode of strict intellection. Further still, there is another mode of non-representational intellection, which is not even manifestative: the intellection in a “towards”. It is not the case that we proceed towards reality, but that reality itself is given to us in a “reality as towards”. Consequently, to know intellectively is to proceed from something towards something else supported on the first something. The terminus of the “towards” is strictly intelligible, even though it may be completely unrepresentable. Representation, groping, manifestation, turning from one thing towards another, are many ways of knowing reality intellectively. They certainly do not have the same rank or the same richness, however, they are strict intellection.
Furthermore, all these modes have to be taken as a oneness. The oneness of all the senses, for all men, resides ultimately in the intelligence. In its turn, intelligence consists in apprehending reality in all its modes. Finally, reality is, at one and the same time, the oneness of its modes of reality. This oneness is not only radical, but also intrinsic and formal. In other words, it is not only that each of the modes locates itself in the intelligence, but that each mode is formally overreaching the others, because although the senses may be different, and may sense reality in its different modes, however, all of them {288} sense one selfsame thing: reality. That is the reason why all these modes overreach each other in the very oneness of reality. Consequently, intelligence intellectively knows reality unitarily in this overreaching of its different modes. And thus, the “towards”, overreaching the figure, the manifestation, and the support of the “towards” in a formal oneness, confers upon intellection a special characteristic. This overreaching, actually, forces us to proceed from the figure of a thing towards the inside of what the thing is in its very self; forces us to proceed through manifestation towards the manifested thing; forces us to proceed from one firm thing towards others beyond that thing. The overreaching or formal unity of the “towards” with these three modes of reality (figure, manifestation, and support) fundaments the necessity of things in their triple dimension of the “inside”, the “through”, the “beyond”. An intellection thus constituted is inexorably a “going” towards something. Furthermore, the overreaching of the oneness of the “towards” with the other modes, qualifies the character of this “going”. It is, above all, a going through groping, and what the groping provides to the going is a particular direction: it is a “going groping towards”. The going, therefore, is not an indeterminate going, more or less random, but the outline of a “way”; it is a going making its way among things, among their aspects, and among their manifestations. Furthermore, it is going on a way imbued with a dynamic tension: it is an effort towards a greater and better intellective knowing. Of course, the characteristic of things known first somehow determines the characteristic of the groping. To grope among stones is not the same as to grope among humans or sentiments or moral motives. But the fact that stones, humans, and mental states have to be known intellectively precisely through groping proceeds from the sentient structure of intelligence.
Therefore, the oneness of the going as a “going towards, which struggles to find a way by groping” is that particular mode of knowing {289} intellectively we call search. Search, therefore, is not a search for reality, but a search in the reality. What we search for are real things forced by the very characteristic of the reality: the reality “as towards”. This is precisely where the first step of reason occurs. Reason is not intelligence, but rides on it, not as a mere discursive or inquiring use of the intelligence, but as an inexorable necessity due to the very structure of intelligence as such, as sentient apprehension of things as real. Supported on the apprehended reality in a first intellection, we find ourselves hurled to the search, to reason, by the very reality “as towards”. It is not enough to have said, as we all know, that reason “and” intelligence are one faculty, but it is necessary to state what is the characteristic of this “and”, i.e., to state in what does the intrinsic oneness of reason, and intelligence consist, What is the characteristic of their intrinsic sameness? Reason is not founded on the fact that the first intellection may be complex, confused or insufficient, but on the fact that intellection is an intellection of reality in its mode as “towards”; and it is so because it is a sentient intellection.
The question is not resolved by saying that reason moves by itself in the plenitude of being, in such a way that the things that “are” would be a mere finite “contraction” of being in all its fullness. If that were the case, reason would search for being beyond these finite things because none of them “is” in the whole plenitude of being. This is not acceptable due to several reasons, especially three. First, because this we call “being” is, constitutively, according to my point of view, a secondary actuality of the real qua real: it is the actuality of the already real in the respectivity of reality. Being is not this respectivity, which is a moment of reality, but rather the actuality of the real in this respectivity. I cannot embark on this problem here, which I have {290} expounded elsewhere2. Therefore, intelligence, and reason are not primarily, and radically the faculty of being, but the faculty of reality.
In the second place, because even if being is that, which is searched for in things, it is not due to the fact that being in its whole fullness is contracted in the things that “are”, but precisely the opposite, it is due to the fact that real things, by having that secondary actuality, which is their “being”, force an “expansion” —so to speak— of reality into being. Reason searches for the fullness of being not because it contains inscribed in its very self, as a kind of intrinsic final purpose, being in all its fullness —or at least the movement towards that plenitude—, but just the opposite, because it is impelled to this by real things, which “are” because they begin by first being “real”. Therefore, the being, which reason would search for in things is not something contractively limited to them, but rather contrariwise, it is things themselves, which as real, are opening the ambit of being.
In the third place, even if it were true that being in its fullness is something intrinsic to reason, this, however, would leave the essential question intact: Why do we have to search? In other words, Why is there reason? The moment of search itself would remain unexplained in this conception. The mere finitude of the being of real things within the transcendental order —in this conception that order would be constituted by being in its whole plenitude—, when contrasted with plenary being, would not lead but to a mere affirmation, to the affirmation of an inadequacy; but this affirmation alone by itself is not a searching movement. We have to search, i.e., there must be a reason, precisely because intelligence presents to us {291} reality “as towards”. The transcendental order is not only what it is constitutively by itself, but is present to us in a certain way, in accordance with the type of our intelligence. We must pay attention, therefore, not only to what transcendentality is in itself, but to its mode of presence. Hence, the transcendental order is not the order of being as such, but the order of reality as such. And this reality is not present to us just as something, which “is there”, but also at one and the same time as something, which is there “as towards”; the transcendental order is present to us in the intrinsic, and formal unity of all its modes in the sentient intellection. Only because intelligence knows the transcendental order intellectively in this manner as a primum cognitum, and only because of this, is intelligence already going “towards”, and therefore, has to search inexorably. There is, and there has to be a reason, let us repeat it, because reality itself “as towards” is already present in the intelligence.
From this flows an essential characteristic of reason: reason is always, and constitutively an open reason. It does not know what it is going to encounter, not even if it is going to encounter anything; but it is constitutively open to the terminus of its search. This aperture —I repeat— is not a kind of intrinsic finality of reason, or the aperture of the human being towards something beyond, but it actually is the dynamic expansion of the formal structure of sentient intelligence into the “towards” of the reality apprehended by sentient intelligence. This, and only this, is what keeps us open. But, open towards what? Towards what things may give us of themselves in our stepping march towards them; they are the ones that give us the reason. But they provide it to us because we are already going towards them from our first apprehension of reality as such. Open reason is reason constitutively pending on things giving themselves to us. Reason is not {292} rational construction or reconstruction. What reason builds is its own way to reach the fundament of the truth of things, but it does not build the things themselves rationally, and not even reconstructs them rationally, because to know intellectually is not necessarily to represent. On the contrary, things are the ones that give us or do not give us reason in reality. And this “giving” —as I said before— is not a mere passive, and fortuitous reception of what things are giving to us, but a positive encounter with things in the stepping march we already sketch while going towards them in reality. Without this previous sketch there would be no stepping march, and no encounter; there would only be simple intellection, but no reason.
Consequently, things, it must be emphatically underlined, can give us reason in many different ways. I am not only referring to the difference mentioned above between the rational and the reasonable, because that particular difference concerns the type of coincidence between what reason searches for and what reason finds. Here, on the other hand, I refer to the way how things give themselves to our open reason at the terminus of the search. This way or mode does not coincide in general with the way things presented themselves to us in the first intellection, which initiated the stepping march of reason. Just the opposite. For example, it is very possible that reason may find visually, and representatively what it is looking for through an intellectively known manifestation or notice. It is also possible that a thing known intellectively visually and representatively may initiate a searching stepping march of reason, which may find at its terminus nothing but a notice. It is altogether possible that a notice or manifestation may only take us in the search to nothing else but to another notice or manifestation. But the encounter is in all these ways the fundament (rational or reasonable, no matter) of the truth of reason. The truth accessible to reason is not {293} ascribed to any particular way or to any particular type of encounter. Philosophy has been increasingly propounding the idea that reason is a representative and rational encounter with things. This is radically false. The encounter can be quite varied in its modality, and the same occurs with its type. But, once we have an encounter, there is always in all its modes a fundament of the truth or falsity of reason. Similarly to how we deal with intelligence, we must conceptivize reason (as actual inquiring expansion of the intelligence) in all its complex real unity. This is essential.
c) With this point settled, let us continue with our problem. Man, in the constitutive religation of his personal being, intellectively knows the power of the deity in “things”, in the widest sense of the term. The power of the deity is not something that floats over itself, but something inhering in things themselves simply by the fact of being real, i.e., inheres in the very reality of things. From this follows, that inhering in real things, nevertheless, it constitutively remits to these selfsame things as fundament of the deity, which inheres in them. Deity is thus “manifestation” or “notice” of this fundament, which is hidden in them. And in this, precisely, is what the “mystery” consists. Things as fundament of the deity inhering in them acquire the characteristic of mystery. This fundament is what constitutes, by definition, the divinity, God. God is, thus far, simply the name of the fundament of the deity: this is what is manifested in deity. There is no allusion here to anything transcendent. It could possibly simply be the totality of the cosmos. But in its totality; and because of it, even in this case, this “total” characteristic would be precisely the fundament of the deity of the cosmos, and would manifest itself in the deity. The deity, therefore, is the mere manifestation of the divinity, of God. And, because of this, the intellection of the deity is intellection of a manifestation {294} in a “towards through” it, i.e., towards the divinity through deity. Therefore, the intellection of deity is already the putting in motion of reason on its search for the divinity; it is a search through the manifesting mystery of deity towards the manifested divinity. To understand the characteristic of this stepping march of reason we need to indicate precisely: What does it search for? How does it search for it? What does it find?
aa) What does it search for? The search is not for deity, because deity is already present in the constitutive religation of the personal being of man. What is searched for, and has to be searched for, is the fundament of the deity in the reality of things, i.e., the divinity. The divinity is always the terminus of a search; the only thing not searched for is the deity. But it is not the case of a divinity, so to speak, solely metaphysical, for example in the sense of a first cause. It is the case of a fundament, which may extend to all the dimensions of deity. Consequently, deity is not only an ultimate power, but a possibilitating, and impelling power. This is the reason why the divinity searched for is that something, which man will addresses for support, on the ultimate possibilities to be personally what he is going to be, and impels him to realize himself as a person. God is not only a first being, but the fundament of deity in its three dimensions of ultimateness, possibility, and imposition. This is what man searches for in reality through the mystery, which deity is.
bb) How does it search for it? Man searches for God through His manifestation in deity, going through this manifestation towards what is manifested in it. The way or mode of this search depends in its last instance on the mode itself of the manifestation, i.e., on the very structure of deity. Deity is reality qua reality in its condition of dominating insofar as dominating. And this condition is actualized {295} for man in the constitutive religation of his personal being. And what is actualized in it, at one and the same time with the power, is the fundamentality of the human personal being, because fundamentality is nothing but the actualization of that, which is fundamenting, that is to say, the deity. Therefore, this fundamentality is the one that constitutes, above all, the manifestation of deity, and because of this, makes us search for God in reality qua reality, i.e., “at one and the same time” (“a una”) in oneself, and in all other things3.
Consequently, this fundamentality determines the characteristic of the search. Man searches for God in and with his whole being, in the integral religated attitude of his personal being. It would be a mistake to think that the search for God is a simple dialectic of the reasoning reason; the search for God involves intrinsically and formally the moral, affective, individual, and social dimensions of the human personal being. But it would be a mistake of the opposite sign to think that this search excludes reason. That is totally false. First, because intelligence is an essential moment of the human personal being. And second, because this intelligence is where the rest of the dimensions of the personal being flourish; it is here where the rest of the dimensions play their indispensable function. Morality, hopes, the social world, are something specific and in addition not reducible to any kind of theoretical concepts. Nevertheless the moral, the affective, and the social move intelligence internally to clarify what is desired, what is obligatory, and the structure of the social world. This is the function of reason. In its turn reason does not clarify the terminus in a purely rational way, but only reasonably, i.e., reason itself is modulated in its intellection by the moral, affective, individual, and social dimensions of the personal being. The fact is that {296} reason, just like intelligence, is not merely a pure conceptual representation; reason is a going towards the fundament of the truth of deity. Therefore, this going is to proceed with the clarification of the stepping march to which the entire being of man hurls him through the manifestation of deity. Precisely because this manifestation concerns the whole of man, the stepping march of clarification is that peculiar mode of intellection by reason we call groping. Reason proceeds by groping among all dimensions of his personal being. And since these dimensions insofar as religated are under the power of reality as such, the groping is eo ipso a groping of the reality of all things as manifestation of deity. Reason gropes within the mystery of deity because it is carried along by the fundamentality of his own personal being. Our own personal being, actually, insofar as reality is also present to us “as towards”. Therefore, this groping fundamentality is the groping towards an ultimate God, possibilitating, and impelling, i.e., in the groping itself we already carry the sketch of what we search for: the sketch of a God as ultimate, possibilitating, and impelling. Without this sketch man would never find that, which we call God. Fundamentality, groping, and sketch are the three characteristics of the search for God by reason, three characteristics, which reason has, not by itself, but because in intelligence the entire being of man “as towards” is actualized. The unity of the three characteristics of the search is imposed and conferred on reason by the sentient intelligence in which the whole personal being of man flourishes.
Nevertheless, because it is a groping, reason keeps making its way through the mystery of deity4. And while {297} making its way reason is offered several different possibilities or ways to proceed towards God; namely, the way of searching for God among the things on which the life of man depends, the way of searching for God beyond all real things, the way of searching for God in the totality of real things insofar as such totality, i.e., in the cosmos. This search, I was saying, involves the entire being of man, and also indeed, his dimension or social structure. Consequently, the stepping march of reason following a certain way does not mean that every man individually considered is searching for divinity. That would be completely false. In general, each individual is already installed on the way, which his social world, the objective spirit, has sketched. Reason is above all “installed reason” on the way that is offered “to him” (Sp. “se” le ofrece) in the objective spirit. Man accepts, therefore, the God that “is reached” (Sp. “se” llega) by this way, the God admitted by his world. Still, an installed reason is not an “obturate reason”. Regardless of the strength of its installation on the objective spirit, individual reason always preserves the capacity to open its own way (either to understand and even confirm the way on which it is installed, or to undertake a new way), because reason is constitutively an “open reason”. After all, it is the work of some —not all— the great founders of religions, and of the meditations of great individual thinkers. They consolidate a way or may open new tracks in the objective spirit to reach God. From this perspective, the search for God as groping is a strict historical experience.
This is how human reason has searched for God, groping among these three ways. It is the stepping march through the mystery of deity in things towards an ultimate reality, possibilitating, and impelling.
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1 See Inteligencia sentiente, Inteligencia y realidad [“Sentient Intelligence, Intelligence and Reality“], op. cit., pp. 99-113.
2 Cf. Sobre la esencia [“On Essence“], op. cit., p. 417-454 (X. Zubiri note).
3 Zubiri notes at the margin: “Explain why it is ‘at one and the same time’ (‘a una’)”.
4 Zubiri notes on the margin: “First: in fundamentality resides the root of the three ways”.