MAN AND GOD


{11}

INTRODUCTION

The title of this book may lead one to think that in it I am going to be concerned with God understood in a particular way, for example, the God of Christianity. But this is not the case. I shall deal only with God in the sense of divine reality, without regard to my particular set of beliefs. Only for the sake of clarity and ease of expression shall I refer almost indifferently to “God” and “divine reality”, unless indicated otherwise.

“God” is the title of a far-reaching problem. This problem can be solved in different ways: positively (theism), negatively (atheism), or suspensively (agnosticism). But it is often forgotten that in the three cases one is dealing with the solution to a single problem. The atheist thinks that since God is not an immediate reality, it is the believer who has the responsibility of justifying his affirmation of God. But the case is the same for the theist. He lives immersed in his faith in God and consequently presumes that it is the atheist who is the one who must provide reasons to deny God. To convert God into a problem is proper for the atheist, but the believer, in this view, has no problem. The atheist and the believer do not think that their atheism and theism, respectively, are solutions to an underlying problem. So, what might that problem be?

The man of today is characterized not so much for having {12} a positive idea of God (theist), or negative (atheist), or agnostic, but by a more radical attitude: that of denying the existence of a true problem of God. For the theist, the one who has the problem of God is the atheist; for the atheist it is the believer. Therefore, the heart of the matter is to discover that God is problematic for all. The believer has to give reasons for his belief and the atheist also has to give reasons for his negation of God, just as the agnostic too must give reasons for his agnosticism. Atheism and agnosticism are no less beliefs than theism. The three need to give the foundation of their respective attitudes because in the final analysis the firmness of one’s state of belief is not enough, and its intellectual justification is necessary.

What kind of problem is it? Not the type of problem that man may or may not posit, as if it were a problem of science, one which is fundamentally arbitrary. In that case, God would be just another object, though perhaps the most important that man must confront. In other words, the problem would be to determine if, besides man and things, there is the reality of God. Rather, the truth is just the opposite: we are dealing with a problem that man must pose to himself. Indeed, it is already posed to us by the mere fact that we are men; it is a dimension of human reality as such. Consequently, this problem must be called theological (teologal). “Theological” does not mean “theologic” (teológico). It means that there is a human dimension formally and constitutively involving the problem of the divine reality, of the Theós. The theological is such by enveloping the dimension which opens onto the divine. The theological involves God himself. The theological is, consequently, a strictly human structure accessible to immediate analysis. We must attend to this analysis.

{13} The clarification of that dimension is the true revealing of the problem of God as a problem. The problem of God, qua problem, is not a problem arbitrarily posed by human curiosity; indeed it is human reality itself in its constitutive problematicism.

Thus it turns out that the title Man and God is not an addition of two “objects”, man “and” God, but the analysis of human reality insofar as it constitutively involves the “turning” (let us call it that) towards divine reality. The “and” of man and God is an experiential constitutive turning. And it is the same in the atheist, the agnostic and the theist applying equally to all men.

The full analysis will be undertaken in three steps that will become the three parts of this study:

Part I. Human reality.
Part II. The problem of divine reality.
Part III. Man, experience of God.

These three steps constitute an intrinsic and formal unity. It is in this unity that the ultimate structure of the theological dimension of man consists. The making of the reality of man is what, in a synthetic way, must be called theological experience.



{15} PART I

HUMAN REALITY

Man is a type of reality which incorporates two essential aspects. He is, in the first place, a reality with well determined characteristics. Thanks to them the possessor is human. But these same characteristics pose another essential problem. Man not only has characteristics different than those of other realities, but in virtue of their very nature, he is a reality that essentially must go on making himself. In other words, we must examine two questions: What is it to be man? and, How can one be a man? These are not two independent questions; but neither are they identical. They must be examined in succession, and this examination will take place in the following two chapters:

Chapter 1. What is it to be man?
Chapter 2. How can one be a man?



{17}

CHAPTER 1

WHAT IS IT TO BE MAN?

First we must determine the essential characteristics of man. Man is, above all, a human reality. Therefore, what we ask ourselves is, In what does human reality consist?

This simple enunciation of the question involves two terms: reality and humanity. Although the general theme of the book does not strictly demand explanation of what is understood by “reality”, I cannot but recall, on account of the need for intellectual rigor, some concepts which I explained in detail in my book, On Essence. The reader need not dwell too much on them, because if I bring them to mind now is only to sharpen the philosophical exposition of the main theme. Subsequently I will enter into what more directly concerns the theme of this book: the human characteristics of this reality.

The present chapter is, therefore, divided in two sections:

§ 1. Reality.
§ 2. The human aspect of this new reality.


{18}

§1

REALITY

Everything real is constituted by certain notes. I shall use this term and not “properties” for reasons which I will explain later. It is a simpler term than “property”, and has the double advantage of designating two moments of the thing. On the one hand a note belongs to a thing; on the other, it advises us what the thing is according to this note. Thus, heat is a note of some particular thing, and at the same time tells us what the thing is in accordance with this note.

I understand by the reality of something the fact that these particular notes may belong to the thing de suyo¹, that is to say, they may not be just signs of a response. Thus, for a dog, heat is something that “heats”; in other words, it imposes on him a type of behavior: to approach, to flee, etc. But for us, as men, heat above all else “is warming”. Its characteristics belong to it de suyo. And that is why by being apprehended this way, de suyo heat has what I shall call the formality of reality. It is not merely stimulating. “Reality” does not mean existence here, and still less something beyond my apprehension; but it is the formality according to which that which is called “heat” is apprehended as something de suyo, or in other words, according to the formality of reality. Existence itself belongs to the content of reality and not to the formality of the real. All notes, in addition to their content and their existence, have a formality of otherness depending on the one who apprehends. For an animal the formality {19} of what is apprehended is mere stimulation; for man what is apprehended is de suyo, is reality.

This de suyo has to be taken in a strict way, i.e., as a formality of something strictly apprehended. And that is not particularly obvious. Hence, I never strictly apprehend a table, some walls, etc., de suyo. What I apprehend de suyo is a thing, a constellation of notes (a thing that has such form, such color, such weight, etc.), but I never apprehend a “table”. The table is not de suyo a table; it is a table only in so far as it forms part of human life. What is apprehended as a moment or part of my life is what I have called a “meaning-thing” to distinguish from “reality-thing”. It is that which, with respect to a different set of problems, I expressed by saying that a real thing is what acts on other things or on itself, formally, in virtue of the notes that it possesses de suyo. The table acts on other things, not as a table, but as heavy, colored, etc. A table is only a “meaning-thing”. However, a meaning-thing is not independent of a reality-thing. A meaning-thing is but a reality-thing which has the capability to be a meaning-thing. Water has no capability to be a table. That capacity is what constitutes the “condition”. Condition is the articulation of a meaning-thing and a reality-thing.

1. Real things have a multitude of notes and this multitude forms a unity. But the unity is not simply additive: a thing is not green, plus heavy, plus warm, etc., but is an intrinsic unity. It is what we call a system. What constitutes a systematic unity?

Every note in a thing is a “note-of”. Of what? Of all the rest. Glucose has a reality proper to itself; but insofar as it is in my organism it is “glucose of” this {20} system we call an organism. This moment of the “of” is not a conceptive moment, but a real one; I will say that it is a physical moment in the sense of real, as differentiated from conceptive. And so the “of” expresses the unity of the notes. And this unity is just what constitutes the system. It is in the “of” that the system as such consists. The ultimate and primary reality of a thing is to be a system of notes. This “of” imposes on each note a way of being “of” all the rest of them. It is what we express by saying that each note has a perfectly well-defined position inside the system. Thus, the system has a systematization. This systematization is cyclic and not lineal. If it were lineal the final note would not be a note of all the rest of them. The system is of all the notes in a cyclic way, that is, in an enclosed way. And now is the time to repeat that this “of” is a physical thing and not a conceptual moment of the real thing. The “of” belongs to a thing de suyo; it is therefore a moment of its reality.

2. These notes of a real thing are of two types: some stem from the activity of certain things upon others. These I call “adventitious notes”. But there are others which do not proceed from such activity, but belong to the thing by virtue of what it already is de suyo. They are “its” notes. For this reason I call them “formal notes”. This character of “its” constitutes the proper mode of how a thing is “one”. The unity is modalized in each thing. And to this mode, in accordance with which each thing is one, is what I call constitution. Therefore, all the notes of a system are constitutional. So, in virtue of this constitutional character of each real note, the system of notes possesses what I have called constitutional sufficiency.

{21} 3. A real system whose notes have constitutional sufficiency possesses, by virtue of this, a certain autonomous character with respect to constitution: this is what I call substantivity. Constitutional sufficiency is the formal reason for substantivity.

Substantivity is not Aristotelian substantiality. For Aristotle, a substance is the subject of properties, especially essential properties. But here, real things are not substantial subjects, but substantive systems. For Aristotle, what I here call “notes”, are accidents, that is, unsubstantive realities. But, what Aristotle never realized is that there can be unsubstantive substances. And they exist; for example, the numerous substances which comprise my organism. In an organism there is no more than one substantivity, proper to the organism as a system. And all its substances, for example, the glucose, have in themselves and by themselves what has been called their own substantiality. However, this same glucose, ingested into my organism, has preserved its substantiality (I ignore metabolic transformation), but has lost its substantivity, in order to convert itself into a mere “note-of” my organic system. It is there as an unsubstantive substance. Precisely because of this, I do not call notes “properties”, but “notes”. They are not properties inherent to a subject but coherent notes among themselves in the unity of the system.

4. Among these constitutional notes there are some that are grounded in others. But there are some which are not grounded in others, but because of being ungrounded, rest upon themselves. That is why these notes are more than just constitutional; they are constitutive. For example, all white cats with blue eyes are deaf. These notes are certainly constitutional, but are not constitutive because they are grounded on the notes of the genes, {22} which then would be constitutive, unless they in turn are grounded on others; that is a biological problem which does not concern us here. The constitutive notes comprise the radical subsystem of substantivity: they are its essence. Essence is the structural principle of substantivity. It is not the correlate of a definition. It is the system of notes necessary and sufficient so that a substantive reality may have its remaining constitutional notes, including adventitious notes.

5. The unity of the system, I said, is its “of”. That is what is primary in a real thing, what constitutes its “interiority” so to speak, its “in”. But then different notes are its projection ad extra, its “ex”. This projection is just what I call dimension: it is the projection of the whole “in” into the “ex”. This projection may have different modes. Each one of them is a dimension. I call them thus, because in each the total unity of the system is measured. These dimensions are dimensions of the constitutional sufficiency; they are dimensions of the substantivity.

6. Because they are real notes, these notes qualify the system itself, that is to say, the real thing, in a peculiar way. The notes are not simply of this or that content, but each note is a form of reality. The color green is the greenish form of reality. And taking the entire system as a constituted reality, this unity is what I call form of reality. Thus, the notes which a living being has are reduced to physico-chemical elements. However, the living being has its own form of reality because it is different from the one belonging to a star or a stone. Life is a form of reality, it is not a force or an element.

{23} On the other hand, in virtue of this form of reality, the system belongs to reality in its own modality. This is the mode of implantation in reality. Thus, personhood is a way of being implanted in reality differently from the mode in which, for example, a stone or a dog is implanted. Let us not confuse, then, form and mode of reality, even though I may use the two indiscriminately when what I wish to say does not require that distinction.

In summary, everything real, be it an elemental note or substantive system, has two moments. There is the moment of having those notes; this is suchness. And there is the moment of having form and mode of reality; which technically I shall call “transcendental”, designating with this term, not a concept, but a physical moment, as I will soon point out.

7. Each real thing, through its moment of reality, is “more” than what it is through the mere content of its notes. The moment of reality, in fact, is numerically identical when I apprehend several things as a unit. This means that the moment of reality is, in each real thing, an open moment. It is “more” than the notes, because it is open to everything else. This is the openness of the real. The openness is not of conceptual character. Nor is it the case that the concept of reality can be applied to several real things; rather, reality is a moment physically open in itself. That is the reason why transcendentality is not a mere concept, common to everything real; transcendentality is not community. It is actually about a physical moment of communication.

8. The last thing I must add is that everything real, both in its suchness and in its reality, is intrinsically respective. This is the respectivity of the real. {24} Respectivity is not relationship because relationship presupposes the things related. Rather, respectivity is a moment of the constitution of each relation. Respectivity remits each real thing to another; therefore, it has a remitting dimension. But in order to be able to remit the real to other realities, each real thing must begin by being open constitutively. Because of this, in order to be what it really is, the real is constituted in this openness, in accordance with which the form and mode of reality are de suyo. They have to be so because the openness of reality means that each real thing is so in a determinate form and mode. Insofar as this occurs, we say that a real thing has a form and a mode of reality founded in openness: the ground of this “itselfness” of the real is precisely the respectivity. Nothing is real if it is not “its own” reality, and nothing is “its own” reality unless it has to be, by virtue of being constitutively open. This openness, and consequently, this respectivity, affects the real in its two moments of suchness and of reality. The result is that every real thing is open “towards” other real things, and each form and mode of reality is open to other modes and form of reality.

9. The unity of reality is not the product of some type of external assembly, by a táxis, as Aristotle thought. As I see it, this is not the case. We are concerned with what each reality is in itself. If we imagine the creation of a reality, plucking notes out of nowhere, we would have to say that in this fabrication, the respectivity to other realities comes in as a formal element.

To be sure, these realities can be quite diverse. They may be other realities already constituted; and in that case their intrinsic unity and respectivity is that which, without going into more detail, we call the cosmos. But this is not the {25} radical respectivity, because in fact there could be, and apparently there seem to be, several diverse kósmoi. The radical respectiveness in question is the respectivity not to other real things, but to another reality, whatever it may be (even though it might not exist) inasmuch as it is real. Reality as such is respective. And then I shall no longer call this respectivity “cosmos”; I shall call it world. There can only be one world. For me, the world is the respective unity of all realities insofar as they are realities. World, then, is not the same as cosmos.

And so, precisely because respectivity is not relation, even if there were only one real thing, this thing would be intrinsically and formally respective in and by itself. It would be in and by itself cosmic and worldly.

10. Due to its respectivity any real thing is present in the world. Being thus present is what I call actuality. Classical philosophy understands by “actuality” the character of act which something has, understanding by “act” that which is opposed to potency, that is, the plenitude of being in which the act consists. But I prefer to call this character not “actuality”, but actualness (actuidad). When talking of actuality in our day-to-day language, we do not refer to the character of act but to something different. Thus, for example, we say the viruses have a great deal of actuality today, but lacked that type of actuality a century ago, despite the fact they were then realities in act. One and the same reality can have several actualities, either simultaneously or successively, and can acquire new actualities or lose some, without changing the notes of its actualness. In this sense actuality does not coincide with actualness, but incorporates a moment of mere presentiality. Nonetheless actuality does not {26} consist in this presentiality; it consists in being now (estar) present. Not presentiality, but being present qua being now (estar), is what constitutes actuality. This being present can be of many different kinds. In the example of the viruses, their way of being present in our century is extrinsic to them. But there are cases in which being present is an intrinsic moment of the real itself, for example, when we say that a person became present in some place; this is the being present of the real from itself. There are modes of actuality which concern the notes of a thing. But there is an actuality that does not concern the notes; rather, it concerns the moment of reality of the thing itself. Everything real, merely by being real, is intrinsically and formally respective, i.e., it is present, it is actual in the world. It is actual not only from itself —as it is according to the notes—, but is actual in itself. It is actual, not only intrinsically, but formally. And so, this actuality of the real qua real is intrinsically and formally what constitutes being. Being and reality are not the same. Being is always of reality and as such presupposes it; this is the posteriority of being. And this posteriority is precisely actuality. What is primary with respect to things is not to be entities, but realities. The actuality of the real, inasmuch as it is real in the world, is being; being is being now (estar) present in the world, qua being now. What remains open is the question of the different modes of this intrinsic and formal actuality.

11. Whatever is real because of its respectivity is real as a function of the other real things. This is the functionality of the real. Thus, the luminosity of a star depends on its temperature. Functionality is not necessarily causality. Causality is only a mode of functionality, but {27} not the only one. Mere succession, for example, is also a type of functionality. A law is a type of functional dependency, but not necessarily causal. Now, the real is not a function just of what other real things are according to their suchness; rather, everything real, in its own moment of reality, depends on other realities through its own moment of reality, because this moment of reality is intrinsically and formally respective. This functionality of the real qua real, is the fullest concept of the respective dependence of substantivities and their notes. Functionality is not production, i.e., cause; but indeed as I said, causal production is just a mode of functionality of the real qua real.

12. Finally, real, we say, means de suyo. But this de suyo has in its turn three different formal moments. It has a moment according to which a thing is what it is de suyo in and by itself, as it is. This is what I call naked reality. It is not identical to the de suyo; but in the course of this book, for obvious reasons, I have taken de suyo and “naked reality” as synonymous. The de suyo also has that moment which we express in Spanish when we say that such and such a thing happens or has to happen due to the force things exert (por la fuerza de las cosas). Here “force” is not what is meant in Newtonian mechanics; rather it is the forcefulness or necessity that a thing be thus de suyo. This forcefulness belongs to the de suyo, to the real. Furthermore, the de suyo has the moment of powerfulness. The reality of the real is, as I said above, “more” than its content of suchness. This “more” signifies that reality dominates over its content. This dominance is what is proper to powerfulness. Clearly it is not forcefulness. All forcefulness {28} can be powerfulness; but not all dominance is forcefulness. Powerfulness is the dominance of the real.

Naked reality, forcefulness and powerfulness come together in a certain way, as is obvious, in every sentient intellection. But as moments of the de suyo they are not identical. That is why they have been the source of different concepts. I do no more than refer to some examples to clarify the ideas I have been expounding. Thus, the de suyo as naked reality is what the Greeks conceived in the concept of “nature”, phýsis. The forcefulness was expressed in the concept of the necessary, anánke. Clearly, not everything natural is necessary, nor is everything necessary (when it is not a necessity of naked reality) natural. The powerfulness conceived explicitly and formally as real is not simply dominance, but dominance of the real qua real. But each one of these three moments is tangential, so to speak, to the other two. There is no force from things, there is no necessity that in some way does not brush, more or less, naked reality; and there is no power which may not tend to be forcefulness and reach naked reality in some way. The predominance of one of these moments over the other two may even constitute different types of intellection; but the other two are always present. The predominance of the moment of naked reality constituted the beginning of our knowledge. However, forcefulness had always been present in Greek thought. So, Aristotle tells us (Met. 984b10) that the first pre-Socratics were forced (anankatsómenoi) by the truth. The predominance of forcefulness is what underlies, for example, Egyptian and Assyro-Babylonian mathematics. They discovered, for example, what we call the Pythagorean theorem. But their {29} necessity is mere forcefulness; it does not have the character of the necessity proper to the elements of Euclid, founded on naked reality and not on forcefulness. The problem of power was the occasion for the animist interpretation of power. Powerfulness does not mean anima or animism; rather, animism is a conceptive development of powerfulness. Inchoatively, so to speak, each moment, I repeat, is tangential to the other two. This intrinsic unity is formally constitutive of all sentient intellection. Perhaps this unity of the three moments is what comes through expressly in the meaning, so much debated, of the arkhé of Anaximander.

Our knowing, rooted in naked reality, has forgotten the other two moments of forcefulness and powerfulness. It is urgent that we recover them.

* * *

Before proceeding, I repeat what I indicated at the beginning of Part I. If a reader is not excessively interested in philosophical rigor, he may begin to read the book at the Second Part, and have recourse to the First, if in the course of reading he finds that necessary. If, when reading the First Part, everything is not sufficiently clear, he may refer to my book On Essence, where I have explained in detail almost all the concepts just set down.

This understood, we shall continue. In what does the human part of reality consist? What is man as reality?

_________________________
¹ (Tr. note: literally "from its own self" de su-yo. Spanish adverbial phrase meaning "naturally, appropriately, with nothing extrinsic added to it", which Zubiri uses in its metaphysical sense.)