THIRD PART:

BEING AS GIFT.

We have seen in the second part of the course that the spirit opens itself to a presence
without dominating such presence completely. The third part will investigate how the
spirit offers itself to this presence. The first chapter is dedicated to the analogy and to
participation. Here, we will see how being reveals itself logically as it emerges and
unfolds properly. We will elaborate on the diverse voices of being. The second chapter
explains, with the help of the two transcendentals, which are truth and goodness, the
manner through which being offers itself as gift to the spirit.

I. The Analogy of Being.

Based on the Scholastic framework, the doctrine of analogy concerns, first of all,
the logical applicability of our universal ideas to individuals that have their proper
consistency. The doctrine of analogy regards therefore the problem of universality of our
ideas and their relation to the reality, which assumes it. This doctrine opens the way of
thinking the rigorous constitution of the predictability of the substances, preserving
firmly the distinction between essence and existence.

Indeed, the substance is its essence, meaning to say an intelligible unity. But the
fact of the unity of intelligibility is a priori, grounded on the unity of the existent. The
substance gathers in itself the accidents, which render its particularity, as the act
actualizes its potency. The intelligibility cannot guarantee the principle of this unity
departing from itself. The particular substantial unity in fact surpasses or transcends the
universal essence. It actuates the universal essence, and renders itself to it as the actual
interiority of the intelligible.

If the essence is simply an inadequate potency to the substantial act, the substance
cannot be said essentially. Then, we are condemned not to know it. Any kind of
judgement will be denied of it. It is, therefore, necessary that the existential unity is
expressed by means of the essential unity. Here, the essence, as intelligible form,
manifests the existence intelligibly. The movement of the essence towards the existence
of the substance is considered as that which constitutes properly the analogical language.

So, first, we will expound the doctrine of the logical forms of the analogy, as
purely their instances on the intelligence of the idea of being. We will show then how
these logical forms take root in ontology. Finally, we will see how the grouping of finite
beings is structured by means of the act of being. Here, the essence consists the presence
of its proper and unique act.

1
 A The Diverse Voices of Being 1

Based on the contemporary discourse in metaphysics, being expresses itself in

plurivocity, diverse voices. The voices of being indicate the diverse particular modalities
of linguistic reference to the existent. These modalities cover the diverse games of
language. According to William Desmond, the modality of reference can be exercised in
the manner that is univocal, equivocal, dialectical, and metaxological.

1. The Univocity of Being.

The reference is univocal when the term used is applied in one sense or one
meaning to different things. The univocal term has a proper logical basis. It agrees to the
specie as it concerns its individuals; to the genus as regards to their specie. It renders, in
fact, a unification of multiplicity. The construction of this unity is in cadence by the
intellectual project, which looks at the universality as always better. Now in such logical
line, that which is extended more universally is also that which carries in itself the
content more lacking. The width of the extension of a logical term is in fact inversely
proportionate to that of its understanding. And it is because of this that the concept of
being, which has therefore the greater extension, is also, as a univocal concept, that which
has the understanding more lacking. The univocal being is pauperimum.

The concept of being, made as an abstraction from any other determination,

presents itself to the spirit in the simplicity of its “scientific” sense, objective, univocal.
Such being gathers in itself all the predicates and all the accidents, which determine the
genus and specie. It is more commonly attributed to any substance or subject without any
logical or real distinction. Consequently, such being is measured in poverty of its
application (only one sense) by the power of the spiritual intervention. “Esse
pauperimum” is the abstracted condition of the intelligibility of the whole. It is that
which presents itself in the determined manner to the spirit.

The logical univocity of being is radically unsustainable. Certainly, the spirit is in

the level of knowing being which is absolutely indeterminate. But the univocal
universality of being has as a result the impossibility of justifying being in any being,
whatever is the accidental determination. Therefore, the logical univocity of being
contradicts the real universality of being. The logical universality of univocal being
indicates a collective universality, which convenes a grouping without content. The
whole is of being, but nothing is “being”. Being is therefore not a collective universal,
because all that which is, is in its proper fullness, that of its act of being.

The universality of being cannot be ignored itself, but it must on the contrary
imply all beings in their respective unique simplicity. The universality of being is not
only logical, but also ontological. It expresses itself this universality recognizing the unity
of being in the singular unity of every existent.

1
William Desmond, Being and the Between, State University of New York Press, 1995, pp. 47-222.

2
 a) From Prelapsarian to Postlapsarian Univocity.

The focus is on the univocal sense and its diverse ways of privileging the notion
of unity. There is no such thing as absolutely pure univocity. Such univocity would be a
unity totally devoid of mediation and exclusive differentiation. Without the later, there
would be no determination of diversity among beings, no speaking about being, and no
articulated knowing of anything. Absolutely pure univocity is a limit concept, only
intelligible by abstraction from differences, and only articulate by reference to some
sense of the interplay of identity and difference.

Certainly, the notion of unity is indispensable to our efforts to make determinate

sense of being. Much of traditional metaphysics is defined by an oscillation between
univocity and equivocity. This is coherent with the notion of pure univocity as an ideal
abstraction.

Nevertheless, this oscillation emerges from what we might call a prior "lived"
univocity. There is immediacy to our initial immersion in being. This is broken up with
the dawning of our distinctive mindfulness by its mode of rational self-consciousness.
This immediacy of the community of being is aesthetic. The world as given being is
charged with sensuous presencing. We are present to this overdetermined presencing in
our own flesh - the self as sensing, embodied being.

We are in the garden of being, the metaphysical Eden, at home in this rare
univocity. This is the prelapsarian univocity. The dawning of mindfulness in the body,
the emergence of a distinctive sense of self, brings differentiation and the loss of this
metaphysical Eden. As robbing us of the rapturous univocity of the metaphysical Eden,
being as other may even present itself as possibly hostile. No longer home, we turn
against it in knowing. We develop our own rational univocity to take away or mitigate the
seeming threat of enigmatic being. Then we seek to reconstruct univocal being in rational
categories. The result will be, so to say the postlapsarian univocity.

b) Ontological and Logical Univocity

The universal mind has been developed by modern science. Philosophers tend to
be intolerant of the easy tolerance of common sense as it shifts between univocity and
equivocity. Philosophers would radicalize univocal mind and in this radicalization
conquer and transcend the equivocal in being.

Let us consider Parmenides. He passes on the admonition of the goddess: judge

with logos, be discriminate with respect to the logos. The goddess offers Parmenides a
vision of pure being, identical with pure thinking. This vision is revealed after the
passage beyond the equivocations of becoming. Becoming refuses to conform to univocal
being; it is self-contradictory, itself and yet not itself.

Parmenides must transcend the many. The vision of pure eternal, univocal being,
stands counter to the equivocities of becoming and opinion. This single minded

3
reconstitution of the lost whole, absolute unity of being, is promised through philosophy
itself.

Parmenides, besides his being father of univocal logic, is an equivocal

metaphysician. The vision of the absolute unity is given to the philosopher at the end. It is
not produced by his thought. There is a revelation made possible by the goddess. This
cannot be fitted into any logic of determinate univocity. Moreover, any such giving, even
out of absolute unity, must be beyond univocal unity, for there to be any giving at all.
Absolute unity cannot be univocal unity.

Plato, an heir of Parmenides, knew there was no avoidance of differences,

otherness, plurality. Moreover, these could not be determined as non-being, even if, they
could not be determined in terms of the absolute unity of Parmedian one.

The univocal sense is clearly at work when Plato asks the question of being, but it
is relative to the intelligibility of becoming. Becoming is equivocal, but not only so
because it participates in intelligibility. Becoming is not absolutely intelligible, but it is
intelligible. How so? This is by participation of the things that become in their ideal
forms.

These forms are ideal unities of intelligibility. They are many but they still are
completely determinate in themselves, monoeidetic, simple and uncompounded by any of
the mixings of time. We might call them univocal eternal units, by contrast with which
time and mixed things of becoming are equivocal.

In both Parmenides and Plato, the search for univocal unity is driven by response
to the possible equivocity of being. There is an inherent thrust in mind towards
determination. It is the very nature of thinking to identify and differentiate.

On the one hand, the search for univocity may be a potential regression to a lost
immediacy. In that regard, metaphysics may take the form that dissimulates a secret
trepidation before transcendence, a kind of narcissistic retreat. On the other hand, the
search may really be for an articulated sense of the community of being. The rapturous
univocity may simply be the given immediacy of this community.

The metaphysical search for "unity" can be this other quest: in difference, through
difference, with difference, to understand how things do hold together, in their being at
all, in their being intelligible.

This metaphysical search for unity is simply a turning towards, a love of

transcendence. Because metaphysics is double, it is mixed, since the soil of the
development of mindfulness is the rapturous univocity.

The development of perplexity both gives rise to logic and also get overtaken by
it. Perplexity precedes logic and exceeds it, but in the middle the univocal sense can erect
logic into the way to make determinate intelligible sense of being.

4
 The univocal mind expresses itself in response to metaphysical perplexity of
which it is an expression, but once it determines itself in a certain direction, it may turn
against its own source logic then becomes an ungrateful child of metaphysical perplexity.

c) Cartesian Univocity

Perplexity is not completely dispelled by ancient and medieval metaphysics.

Perplexity persists even up to our times. In modern philosophy and science, we see a
development and redirection of the univocal sense.

The redirection in modern philosophy arises from a decreased tolerance of the

equivocal, and an increased exasperation with the epistemological insecurity that goes
with metaphysical perplexity before being.

The perplexity that grows from that is never completely dissipated. There is no
complete answer to the determinate questioning of beings, arising in the further
specification of mindfulness. There is no end to perplexity and questioning, even the
effort has persisted to rationalize being in terms of univocal intellegibility.

This is exacerbated by the fact that the work of univocalizing produces a situation
where our relation to the original charge of the happening of the between becomes
distanced from the first astonishment. In this distancing being seems to be just there; its
excess to rationalization confronts us as another standing opposed to us. Any rapturous
univocity of being dies down. This deadening of the between, in turn, generates an
equivocal difference of an oppositional dualism. Being in its otherness confronts us as
opposed to us in its lifeless thereness. Meanwhile, we live an inward mindfulness in that
is alienated from, seemingly radically different to, that lifeless otherness. Thus there
comes to the fore the idea of mind as a thinking subject, thinking over against, and
thinking against, the mindless object.

The Cartesian method, as it were, technicalizes the univocal mind. It has an

analytical and synthetic side. The rules for the direction of the mind are: reduce the given
promiscuous complexity to the most simple elements possible; these simples will then be
grasped; as if they were irreducible dianoetic atoms, univocal in their irreducibility; as
such dianoetic univocals, they will be perfectly perspicuous to the natural light of reason,
the univocal mind of ratio in general. This is the analytical movement.

The synthetic movement begins once all equivocal shadow has been extruded.
The extrusion will be consolidated by complete enumeration of the simples. Complete
enumeration is itself only possible on the presupposition that to intelligible is to be
countable, which is one of the key tenets of mathematical univocity. Then the complex
will be reconstructed out of the dianoetically idealised atoms of univocal intelligibility.
The reconstructed complex whole will be a synthetic univocal totality, articulated within
itself as a completely determinated intelligibility. The method will be the directedness of
mind towards the construction of such univocal scientific totalities. Implicit in the
direction is the expectation of complete explanation and intelligibility and indeed

5
complete control. Not only is this methodological univocity said to be completely within
the control of mind; it is also with the view to bringing being as other completely within
this control.

2. The Equivocity of Being.

The term is equivocal when it has several meanings, because it sees reality as
more different objects. The term being would be equivocal if it refers to reality different
from one another.

The doctrine of equivocity of being can be deduced by the necessary relation of

substance with its particular essence. Nevertheless, the real distinction between the
necessary relation of essence and existence as established should not be misunderstood.
Because while the essence is a being which can be justified to the existence, but it is not
the reason nor the cause of it. The many accidents that enter in the definition of substance
do not constitute the substance in the unity of its “esse”. As a consequence, the
equivocity of being in its essence must completed by the principle which recognises the
transcendence of being in relation to the its intelligibility.

It can be argued also that the real as such is not subjective. The experience of the
objective reality is my experience. I cannot go beyond my shade of subjectivity reaching
that which for me would be totally other. The experience of alterity is that of an other
related to me. There is therefore a difference of being between my act and the rest; the
other is not “I”. The objective being is other from my real act, because, in my act, I am
present to me and not to the other, while the other is presented to me, not to him/her. And
it is for this reason that the mode of the existence of the object is fundamentally from my
mode of existence. It follows that the term “being” is equivocal. Nevertheless, this
argument does not bring us to a conclusion. The recognition of the other as other is
possible, in fact in reciprocal ignorance, but in the encounter. The other is other if it is
effectively through me, if a common environment reunites us allowing ourselves to
encounter mutually.

a) Equivocal as Indispensable

Equivocal sense has been associated with a doubling of the meaning of saying or
logos. For example, "table" refers to a piece of furniture and "table" as table of contents
of a book. There is nothing in common between the two. We use the same word, but there
is no community of meaning between the 'table' as piece of furniture and 'table' as the
table of contents of a book. The two meanings cannot be reduced to a more basic unity.

But just as pure univocity is a limit, so it is difficult to find absolutely pure

instances of equivocity which would imply without even the hint of a possible mediation.
Absolutely unmediated difference seems to be absolutely unintelligible. We transcend a
simple univocity with the equivocal sense.

The war of philosophers against unintelligibility has made them generally hostile
to equivocal. This war is never finished. Brief lulls before the hydra of the equivocal

6
sprouts another head to replace the one just chopped. The equivocal is a hydra that cannot
be completely killed by univocity. To kill its many heads needs many hands, and
univocity has only one hand at a time. Equivocity is not to be killed but charmed from
being a mythic monster into a fabling of the plurivocity of being.

The doubling that takes place with the equivocal must itself be taken in a double
sense is not merely equivocal. There is a negative equivocal and affirmative equivocal.
The first turns the double into a duplicitous process. The second sees the doubling in
terms of the plurization of being that is essential to constitute a community of irreducible
others.

Equivocity is not always simply due to us, or the failure of our minds to reach
some foundational univocity of being in itself. It is not that we fail being as absolutely
clear-out, laid out in advance in rigidity distinct units, and merely awaiting the
correctness of our atomic propositions. This latter view is implied by certain
substantialist realist metaphysics. Metaphysical knowing, from this perspective, is to
produce the univocal categories to correspond correctly with the univocal substances.
Categories are demanded with a one-to-one correspondence to beings.

Equivocity is not always just our failure of univocal logic, but is rooted in the
character of being itself. Being is metaxological, hence plurivocal. The process of
becoming provides the dynamic ground of univocity. Thus, the ideal of the cut and dried
is an abstraction from this becoming, with a provisional truth. Being as becoming, a flux,
as temporal, as process, as ongoing undermines every effort completely to stabilize being
as an aggregate of univocal substances. These latter are only provisional stabilisation in
that creative process of the universal impermanence.

The overdetermined plurivocity of being turns towards us as the enigmatic face of

ambiguous happening. The equivocal sense is rooted in our equivocity may be at times a
true presentation, a true mirroring of this enigmatic happening. The equivocal sense is not
to be taken as the last word with respect to this enigma. The dialectical and metaxological
senses of a being go further, and do so because true happening of the between is itself
ontologically articulated in a dialectical and metaxological form.

b) Equivocity and the Aesthetics of Being

Equivocity tends to underscore difference, diversity, plurality, often in a

promiscuous and unmediated form. But there is truth to all this, one evident if we
consider the aesthetics of being prior to any logicization, be it philosophical, or scientific,
or mathematical.

Initially being is given to us as an aesthetic show. This aesthetic show is much

more intimate. In the happening of the between, being presents itself as a process of
becoming that is never completely captured in the static determinations that comprise the
ideal of univocal intelligibility. There is a doubleness or pluralization to this becoming

7
that demands of the mind its own dynamic doubling. Mind has to begin to think
otherwise than in static and one-dimensional categories.

We recognize the aesthetics of being if we think of the nature of nature as a

process of becoming. The word nature refers to origin in 'natus': a being born, a coming
to light as being, out of a source that in itself is hidden.

What is born in becoming, nature and the things of nature, are not simple
identities, even when they are singular unities. The aesthetic show of becoming is
equivocal in this regard: being is given as excess. While this coming to be does issue in
determinate beings, the energy of coming to be is not itself exhausted by any one
determinate being or set of such beings. It exceeds every univocalization that would
completely define it in terms of determinate being.

Becoming is the loosening up of all rigid stable determinacies. These provisional

stabilities in time give way to a new creative formlessness and the forming of further and
different stabilities of being. There is a constitutive doubleness that, as coming to be and
passing away, is inscribed ontologically on their being as becoming. Both the coming to
be and passing away themselves are beyond complete univocal determination. To do
justice to the ontological fullness of becoming, we must affirm this constitutive
doubleness: it is not merely indefinite, not merely determinate, but indeterminate and
determinate and the passage between indeterminacy and determination.

The equivocal sense forces us to resist the temptation to explain away the
suggestion of indetermination in the process of coming to be. So for the mind attuned to
the equivocal, nothing is ever absolutely the same. The ambiguous twofoldness of
becoming both is and yet is not.

The ambiguity of the happening of the between is the way it mingles creation and
destruction, life and death, the urge into articulated being.

Being is both one and many, held together and diversified, not one or the other,
but a differentiation of unities into multiplicities and the gathering of multiplicities back
into some togetherness.

The revelation of aesthetic showing cannot be exhausted by any set of finite

determinate concepts. The constitutive plurivocity of being is intimated in the sensuous
showing of ambiguity itself. It is intimated in the pathos and consent that places us close
again to the primal intimacy of being.

c) Mathesis of Nature, Poiesis of Naturing.

The Greek word mathesis (akin to the Sanscrit manas - the mind) denoted the
whole of human knowledge, including what nowadays involves mathematics, science,
and philosophy. Thus, the mathesis of nature refers to the intelligibility or determination
of nature. Poiesis of Naturing would refer to the making or imaging of the process of

8
naturing. This underlines the distinction between the determination via the intelligibles
and the making via aesthetic images.

Being is first equivocally given as aesthetic manifestation. In classical science,

there develops a determined appreciation of the aesthetic show of being, a loss of
naturing as the poiesis of becoming, an attenuation of the poetry of being. Nature is
natured and claimed to be captured in the determinations of mathematical equations.

In modern science, there is a reduction of these plural voices to a dominating

mathematical univocity. Thus reminds us of Socrates' problem with naturalistic,
reductionistic explanation. The whole thing, even intelligibly explained in terms of
naturalistic mechanisms, is pointless; if there is no point to the whole, if the good and
being are not intimately related.

The origin, the father of all things, produces the cosmos as the most beautiful and
good and perfect possible, because it is good to be. Ingredient in being good is the
geometrical intelligibility of matter.

The world of post-Newtonian physics, we find a significant shaking of

mathematical stability. This stabilization of Newtonian univocity has given way to the
dynamism of the quantum world. Mathematical univocity skirts the equivocal in the
quantum universe as a world of doubles. Microevents can be described as waves or
particles. The double language indicates a complimentarity of an undecidability. We need
the two languages to describe the doubles. In this doubleness indeterminacy enters. This
indeed is taken up into mathematical formulation in terms of classical causation. We are
at the edge of univocal causality and necessity. There is a breakdown of univocity when
univocity is pushed towards its limits. This is an immanent breakdown, which is the
prelude to the breakthrough into another way of trying to do justice to the truth of things.

Classically minded philosophers have criticised the uncertainty relations, yet these
relations yield calculations of predictions that have been extraordinarily successful.
Those who would reiterate classical views have not yielded comparable successes. The
irony is that what seems to be the subversion of univocal precision itself yields an order
of univocal precision generally far superior to the singular model of pure univocal
precision itself. We might say that the very dual descriptions that deconstruct univocity
open up the possibility of univocity, beyond pure univocity itself.

For classical physics, an interplay of indeterminacy and determinacy as describing

the nature of the happening would be rejected, there is no indetermination in the
happening: there may be in our description of happening; but proper description will be
overcoming of the indeterminateness of our ignorance by the exactly definite formulation
that matches the exact determinacy of the happening.

For quantum physics, this interplay is a necessity forced on thought about nature
by the nature of nature. The interplay of determinacy and indeterminism is not confined
to our descriptions.

9
 Microevents lend themselves to dual descriptions, each equally possible and
indeed equally necesssary. This might be seen as a pointer towards the potential
plurivocity of being, as exhibited at the microlevel. It may also signal a rudimentary
ontological freedom in the happening of energy at this basic level. Freedom, here, implies
no projection of freedom in an anthropomorphic sense. But rather refers to a certain
openness of possibility inherent in matter-energy at this level of micro-events. This
openness suggests something about the naturing of the microevents themselves.

As a conclusion, first, to speak of "likeness" is to grant fallibility to knowing. We

find not absolute univocal certitude to our scientific claims: there is the "likelihood" of its
truth, given the preponderance of the evidence and the coherence of the theoretical
hypothesis. Yet such fallibility offers no justification for any privileging of subjectivity;
rather being and its truth might be other than we think. Therefore, continued openness to
the thinking of other being is needed. Likeness and likelihood are carriers of the self-
transcendence of mind towards what is other. They indicate a humility before the other in
thinking itself.

Second, this concerns the realistic side of relatedness. The meta of metaphor is to
be read as a vector of reference and relatedness to an otherness that saying itself does not
simply produce out of meta of the metaxological: meta can mean both in the midst and
also beyond; being in the middle and being related to what is beyond or other.

Third, this concerns the worth of being. If there is to be justified claim made by
the human being as creator of value, there must be some ontological basis for value in
being itself. For the human being to be a source of value, creation must not onl hospitable
to the good, but it must be good, be itself a creation of the good.

d) The Human Being: Summit of Equivocity.

The human person is the equivocal thing par excellence. It is the being of the
human that is equivocal, not just his speech about the human. Being bespeaks itself
equivocally, but most glaringly evident in the human being, where the power of the
indeterminate becomes original and freely creative.

We find no simple univocal identity to the human being. The human being has
been called that is always in heat, or the laughing animal, the naked ape and many more
things. The univocal mind will look for one defining characteristic that provides the
conclusive essential definition. And yet we have a pluralization of essentials, all of which
seem quite reasonable in their own way.

For man is excess; man is the animal of flourish, the entity of exaggeration and
hyperbole. Here the energy of transcendence becomes mindful of itself in becoming, as
an incessant othering of the original power of being. It is this excess of self-
transcendence that is coming to manifestation in the equivocalness of being, the
constitutive ambiguity of being in the between that cannot be reduced to one essential,
univocal definition. We do exhibit essential characteristics, but there is no one single

10
univocal one that will tell the full truth. Our definition is beyond definition. With us there
is an excess to the defining that is never completely encapsulated in any one definition.

The excess of transcendence makes the human being the only laughing animal.
There is no mathematics or geometry of the comic. Spell out a joke and there is no
laughter. Comedy arises from the power of equivocation to generate creative possibility.
If all being were merely univocal, there could be no comedy.

3. The Dialectics of Beings.

If the univocal sense of being emphasizes the notion of sameness, and the
equivocal sense highlights diversity of being, the unmediated difference of being and
mind, the dialectical sense emphasizes the mediation of the different, the reintegration of
the diverse, the mediated conjunction of mind and being. Its mediation is primarily self-
mediation, hence the side of the same is privileged in this conjunction.

a) The Equivocity of the Equivocal.

The dialectical and metaxological senses each call for modes of mindfulness that
seek to think through the ambiguity without reduction. We do not reject univocity, but
total retreat to univocity is out. We do not reject equivocity, but nihilistic totalization of
equivocity is out. We need to go beyond both, but acknowledging the contributing truth
of both.We are not made to return to any rigid univocity, but thought is loosened up for
something more than both univocity and equivocity. These are dialectical and
metaxological.

Each of these senses is mindful not only of the beings that come to be in the play
of determination and indetermination, but also of the importance of this doubleness,
relative to being, and most significantly relative to the milieu wherein beings come to be.
This milieu wherein the double play is effected is the happening of the between. The
dialectical and the metaxological senses are more approximate to the ultimacy of this
happening in that they are more complexly mindful of this doubleness of the between.
They are not just mindful of beings, determinate or not; not just mindful of a transition
between indeterminacy and determination in beings that become. But they are more
deeply mindful of both these as ontologically articulating the happening of the between.
Such mindfulness concerns not only this happening, it also faces into the enigma of the
very coming to happening, the very coming to being of the between itself.

b) Dialectic and Philosophical Tradition

Dialectic has a plurality of meanings. These meanings range from its

identification with specious reasoning, to a method of dissolving specious reasoning. In
the middle ages, it identifies with logic. In the modern period, Kant characterizes it as
critical of illusion when reason strays into contradiction in treating of transcendental
objects. Hegel understands it as the articulating process of development in mind and in
the real itself. Marx applies dialectic to historical process, as does Hegel himself.

11
 By contrast, analytical philosophers viewed dialectic with suspicion identifying it
with specious reasoning, pseudo-thinking.

There are other senses of dialectic connected to the Socratic "maieutic", to the
description of the highest philosophical thinking in Plato's Republic, to the "diaeretic"
method of Plato's Sophists. Aristotle sees Zeno as the inventor of dialectic which Hegel
concurs.

Dialectic has to do with the nature of the immanent development of mind and
thought; with the meaning and intelligibility of being as inherent in being itself; with the
conviction that the immanence of the former development is intimately related to the
inherence of the latter intelligibility. It implies the complex interplay between sameness
and difference, self and other. Dialectic is concerned with the articulation in the
intelligible saying in that interplay, with respect to both mind and being. It is intimately
linked with the sameness of univocity and the difference of equivocity, and most
especially with the oscillation between them.

The vascillating oscillation in the between can be seen positively, since it may
make us think more intensively of the happening of the between, beyond univocity and
equivocity. Dialectic articulates the internal instability of partial truths, false in their truth
because partial, yet true in their falsity because the part dynamically points beyond its
own internal instability to a more complete determination of truth.

c) Dialectic and Beings

There are main points emphasized on the meaning of dialectical relative to beings.
First, the reinterpretation of unity and doubleness; second, the notion of becoming as
immanent transcendence; third, the stress on immanent development, on organic rather
than mechanistic models; fourth, the emphasis on being as mediated, indeed the self-
mediation as the most dominant mediation; fifth, the teleology of this mediation as
leading to the privilege of the whole.

If the univocal reminds us of one voice, and the equivocal of a doubled voice, the
dialectic calls to mind a doubling of voices about being. The process of coming to be and
passing out of being is more than any determinate entity. There is "more" that cannot be
thought completely in terms of any determinate entity. The original energy of being
renews itself again and again, redoubles itself over and over. The fixation on stable
entities is relatively true to the more or less provisional identities that things are, but that
it is not completely true to the ongoing determining of things, considered as a dynamic
process.

The equivocal sense makes us aware to the othering of determinate identities:

things are themselves, but not completely identical with themselves. While themselves,
they also become themselves. Hence, that indicates that they are not fully themselves,
even while being themselves. The equivocal sense emphasizes things as double, identical
and non-identical, same and other, themselves and yet not themselves. This doubleness is

12
itself the promise of further fuller sense of being. but when the equivocal sense takes
itself as the last word, the doubling of beings is seen as the self-dissolution of any claim
to immutable self-identity. The stabilization of the energy of being is dissolved into flux
without essential form, into diversity without togetherness, into plurality without
community.

Dialectic understands the limitation of both these views. But it seeks to recover
what the univocal sense offers and without turning its back on the complixification,
indeed pluralization of identity that strikes the equivocal sense.

Dialectic is the recovering of the senses of sameness, identity and unity that are
first specified univocally, but cannot hold up univocally when the ontological happening
of becoming is acknowledged.

Dialectic seeks to make intelligible this full span of determinate things,

determined in the middle between the extremities of a coming to be and a passing out of
being. To do justice to the being of being, it must take both sides into account, the stable
side of determinate identity and the open side of the indeterminate.

The stress is first on the forming rather than the form, on the structuring rather
than on the structure: the latter are productions of the former. The dynamism is a vector
not towards stasis, but towards the self-realization of the dynamic. The forming process
comes to form, but the form it aims at is itself, as self-forming in an entirely dynamic
self. This self-forming is the becoming whole of the being. That is why coming to be,
understood by the dialectic, underscores the teleological nature of the play between
indeterminacy and determination.

However, there are ambiguities in dialectical teleology that will only become fully
clear when we turn to the metaxological view of being. It is evident that the organic
metaphor rather than the mechanical orients us much more clearly to a process of
becoming directed towards a fulfillment, a realized promise of the determinate being. The
absolute goal of the initially indefinite vector of transcendence will be the whole that is
absolutely self-determining. The teleology of the immanent transcendence will be the
absolutely immanent wholeness of the whole.

The dynamism of transcendence as orientation to a telos is not just confined to a

being or a plurality of beings. We must not forget that dialectical thinking is aware of the
logic of relations. Thus, dialectic applies it to the whole of being. The coming to be of
being in the between is the coming to determination of the co-implication of these beings,
of their being together in a community of being. They are unities. But they are not
absolute unities. Why? Because their unity is also defined in this community and in this
interplay back and forth between their own dialectical identity and the otherness of
beings that are different.

Therefore, we do not only consider being as univocal, equivocal, but also

dialectical.

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 4. Metaxological of Being

The metaxological sense gives a logos of the metaxu, the middle. It puts stress on
the mediated community of mind and being, but not in terms of the self-mediation of the
same. It calls attention to a pluralized mediation, beyond closed self-mediation from the
side of the same and hospitable to the mediation of the other, or transcendent, out of its
own otherness. It suggests an intermediation, not a self-mediation. The “inter” is shaped
plurally by different mediations of mind and being, same and other, mediations not
subsumable into one total self-mediation. The metaxological sense keeps open the spaces
of otherness in the between, including the jagged edges of rupture that we never entirely
smooth out.

There is an immediacy of this metaxological community. It is at work, before we

articulate it reflectively in our categories. It is at work in the univocal, the equivocal, the
dialectical, but not known explicitly as such, and when stated exclusively in their terms it
is distorted, because truncated. The metaxological is the truth of the univocal, the
equivocal, the dialectical.

Therefore, metaphysics will not be the deduction of a system of categories from

an irrefrangible or irrational logical principle. As both systematic and hermeneutic, it
offers itself as an unfolding interpretation of the many side of the plenitude of the
happening of being.

a) The Plurivocity of Being and the Metaxological

Being is given. Its givenness reappears over and over, redoubled in excess of any
dialectical reduction to a monism of self-mediation. The excess redoubles itself in the
origin, in the middle, and in the end. It is to the pluralization of the mediations of
givenness that the metaxological sense speaks.

If univocity stresses sameness, equivocity difference, dialectic the appropriation

of difference within a mediated sameness, the metaxological reiterates, first a sense of
otherness not to be included in a dialectical self-mediation, second a sense of
togetherness not reached by the equivocal, third a sense of rich ontological integrity not
answered for by the univocal, and fourth a rich sense of ontological ambiguity not answer
for either by the univocity, the equivocal, the dialectical.

If being is given, it is given both for itself and for mindfulness. Mindfulness is
itself given to itself to be mindful of being, both in itself and in its otherness as given.
Being is given as the happening of the between; but this between is immediately given as
mediated between a plurality of centers of existence, each marked by its own energy of
self-transcendence.

The metaxological sense is mindful of openings in the happening of the between.

It is also mindful of the opening of the between itself, beyond all boundaries of finite
determination. Transcendence transcends the happening of the between, even while the

14
between, metaxologically understood, marks an opening beyond itself towards the most
ultimate other. The happening of the between is not completely self-determining, but its
unmastered indeterminacy points beyond the middle to the overdetermined excess of the
origin as other. This excess is also the excess of the good, which is the excess of the end.

What can it mean to say that beings are showing its excess? It means they are
concretions of the transcending power of being that is not closed off in its concretion but
radiates beyond even its singular contractions.

As exceeding determination, this that it is is not subsumable into either a univocal

or dialectical logic of identity. Each entity lives its own irreplaceable that it is at all from
within the intimacy of its own ontological uniqueness.

This irreplaceability and unrepeatability of the singular as a "once", as a that it is,

is not, however, a being that is a closed for-itself. It is for-itself, but it is given to itself as
for-itself. Its integrity of being as a this is itself the gift of the that is is at all. The
intimacy of being is not closed for-itself, for the givenness of beings as for-themselves
exceeds every closure of the "for-itself"; it is a gift from the other, an agapeic letting be
of the finite being in its singularity.

The giving of being is in excess of any closed "for-self," for if there were only
such closed "for-selves," there would be no giving of otherness as other. There would
only be a circle of self-giving, which is no real giving. The metaxological sense of an
agapeic giving of being for the other as other is here clearly different to the dialectical
sense that would finally privilege the closure of the erotic circle of the absolute "for-
itself."

b) The Metaxological and the Community of Beings.

What about the community of beings? The word "community" points beyond the
unity of the univocal, for it is the "unity" of a plurality of integrities, and we must
emphasize the word cum, in Latin means "with", a togetherness of beings in community.
While difference is needed to make plurality possible, this togetherness cannot be any
merely unmediated equivocity.

Beings hold together as integrities. This "holding together" is not a

superimposition on plural terms already finished in their self-definition, such that all that
remains to do is to cast a net of relations over them in their diversity. Rather the
community is constituted by a coming to be. There is essentially dynamic about
community. The articulations of integrities of being are dynamically inter-involved with
each other through a network of relating. "Relating" itself implies an active inter-
involving, beyond all established stases and, as we shall see, beyond all determinate
objectifications.

15
The community of being is a coming into the between. "Coming" here signals the work
of transcending in each singular entity. Beings come to be in the middle, but coming to be
is being.

5. The Analogy of Being.

The equivocity of being is a reasonable consideration of the relation of the

substance with its particular essence. The univocity is equally reasonable to the cause of
difference which separates the intelligible essence from the existence. Substance and
essence are necessarily united and different. Therefore, the idea of being is not univocal
and equivocal, is this contradictory? In reality, univocity and equivocity have two logical
meanings which ontology penetrates one in the other and to understand as two moments
of the constitution of the idea of being.

The idea of being is constituted following the rhythm of the meditation of the
spirit on its activity. In this focusing, the ontological reflection is established. The
reflection on my act and the real, a reflection which perceives the limit of the act that I
am, opens to the intelligence of the real which surpasses me in the act itself by means of
the those which I really put myself. I am not I, in fact, the moment in which I enter in
communion with an other act and me different from it. This knowledge is interior to
being which constitutes anyone in his identity and the one confronted of the other in
difference. The univocity and equivocity, understood in the light of this reflection,
compenetrate themselves mutually. The subjective acts, one according to its proper
difference, places themselves in the unity of their encounter.

Let us recover reflectively that which the good sense affirms: any being is,
without confusing itself with other being, is in the unity of its being. Its existence does
not exhaust in proportion the existence of other beings. The existents are not parts of a
whole. The universal being constitutes them interiorly in their unique and particular
existence. The idea of being, therefore, cannot solely be univocal, nor solely equivocal; it
is analogical.

A term is analogical when its meaning is neither univocal nor equivocal. Beings
which are analogical are different one from the other, but that which is said of them is
identical and gathers them through essence. They possess therefore in the singular
manner that which the universal term signifies.

There are different types of analogy. The analogy of attribution recognises in

diverse beings the same attribute in which a being verifies the concept fully. The analogy
of intrinsic attribution indicates the relation between more beings which carry through
essence that determination; it is the case of logical relation of specie to its genus. The
analogy of extrinsic attribution designates the relation among more beings which
determines a similar predicate, but without which this would be their essentiale. The
metaphor is a form of analogy of extrinsic attribution; it accords to an attribute a
figurative sense; it is in all cases extrinsic to the nature of the subject. The analogy of
proportionality does not refer to that which is analogous to a common norm, but

16
confronts two proportions; these two proportions, as such, are not extraneous one to the
other, in the manner that it can approach and confront itself. The analogy of
proportionality is, by definition, intrinsic to the proportions place to confront.

Being is not extrinsic to that which is; it is really present, essentially, in the
transcendental manner. All that which is, is according to its proper act of being (esse),
unique and irreducible. This act of being (esse) is also universal, common; its common
being does not connote an abstract and collective universality. Being is common, but any
being enough for constituting the idea in its fullness, realising the entire presence. The
idea of being is not therefore extrinsic, but intrinsic; it does not derive from the analogy
of extrinsic attribution and of its metaphorical forms.

4. The Analogy of Intrinsic Attribution.

Understood according to the analogy of intrinsic attribution, the idea of being

relates to all that which is in its existential unity to a common norm, the “esse commune”,
not subsistent. Of this “esse commune” it cannot conceive itself the substance. The
dynamism of the analogy of attribution wants, in fact, that the analogous beings would be
referred to a first normative term, as the specie to the genus. The understanding of the
relation of beings to their norm gives a certain comprehension of the interiority of the
substance to its essence, of the “to be” to the “being”. The essence ( form-matter of
being) is in fact referred to the substance ( to be of the being) as to its reason. It does not
result from that which the norm would be itself. Being as the norm does not subsist
outside of beings.

Nevertheless, the act of being overflows with its profundity and its profusion in
the particular quiddity. The idea of being is not measured by its essence; nonetheless it
delivers itself in a singular unity. The “esse commune” gives itself therefore to its essence
according to a structure opposed to that of its intelligible appearance. For the spirit, the
idea of being is first of all universal essence, then singular act; and on this account that
the substance shows itself to the thought as a hereafter of the essence. The spirit, in a first
step, proportions itself to the substance determining its movement on its intelligibility;
but in itself, the substance is singular act of being, presented as intelligible universality.
Indeed, in relation to understanding, the act conserves its unique being. The maintenance
of its identity does not destroy its gift to the universality of the concrete essence.

Thought knows the substance which conserves itself in itself the hereafter of the
intelligible essence; this knowing is according, but attains the first act of being which
presents itself. Let us say in this sense that esse commune is universal. But it is not
universal in the same mode as an abstract concept. That which characterises “esse
comune” is its immanence immediate to any particular exercise of existing which evolves
in its essence. The “esse commune” is not an attributive concept; it is a transcendental
idea.

The anteriority of the act is the basis ontologically of the analogy of intrinsic
attribution. The idea of being allows of coming itself across in the experience of its

17
reality. The idea of being is first, metaphysically. All comes back to it according to an
immanent link of which nothing is the cause if not the idea itself of being. The idea of
being is first ontologically, although we cannot accede there than in a second moment,
departing from being. It is first ontologically, it cannot only be considered from the
logical point.

5. The Analogy of Proportionality.

The Analogy of Proportionality allows the deepening of the reflection. The “esse
commune” appears here wanting of substance; everything happens as if the idea of being
would not have the being. The analogy of proportionality overcomes this paradox. This
analogy confronts two relations which connect four terms. The analogy of proportionality
takes in fact the idea of being that of which questions itself the analogy of attribution,
departing from the existents in their respective unicity; it recognises the priority of the
existent in front of the predicated universal essence.

The analogy of attribution and the analogy of proportionality stand so between

them as the predicate and the subject of the proposition. The analogy of attribution
considers the predicate according to a universality of the logical type; the analogy of
proportionality considers the act to which the universal predicate convenes. And on
account of this that while the analogy of the attribution takes into consideration the
universality lacking of being of the “esse commune”, the analogy of proportionality
conducts to interrogate this “esse comune” and recognising the emergence always prolific
when it is actuated in any particular existent.

For the analogy of attribution, the ”esse commune” does not have being. It is as
an essence in which the subsistence would be in the particular substance. Now, the
existent substance, particular, is not the measure of the “esse commune”. Based on the
“esse commune”, it needs therefore to operate and overturn which renders possible the
logic of the analogy of proportionality. This considers being as act to the origin of itself.
The essence is related to the existence in two manners: properly when the existence is
identically its essence, or analogically when the existence is not absolutely expressed in
its essence. The analogy of proportionality applied to the idea of being rests on this
immediacy or on this distance of existence confronted of its essence.

When beings of our sensible experience, material origin of our concepts, are not
measured, as beings, by their predicates, since intelligibility does not authorise in itself
the being, the analogy of proportionality, applied to “esse commune”, arouses the thought
to the idea of being, the foundation of the universality of its attribution: being is adequate
to its intelligibility when it gives itself entirely to them. The idea of being is in fact that of
a subject which measures its intelligibility where it presents itself. The distance that
rendered impossible to take the “esse commune” substantial in its essence is thus
overcome.

That which is possible is necessary, because the essence is necessarily

intelligibility through an eventual substance. The necessity of recognising the idea of

18
being the possibility of a real substance in its essence is the rational axis to which the
logical relation of essence to the substance inverts itself in ontological relation of the
substance to its essence. Nevertheless, it recognises itself in that which being can be
itself, necessarily with regard to us, but not regarding to itself. And it is on account of this
that we can rise from the essence to the act recognising to the one and to the other an
insurmountable irreducibility according to the necessity of reason. We will show it to the
proposition of judgement; the following point, on the participation and causality, we will
show on the plan of being itself.

The “esse commune” can be possible, according to the analogy of attribution

applied to the ambit of the predicate; but in the moment in which the affirmation puts
synthetically the essence on being referring it to a substance. At the same time, it is
rendered present in its intelligibility. Now this position of the substance in being, always
particularised in itself, exercises itself in judgement; the act of affirmation exercises the
act of being which transcends it, which is overcoming of itself, erosion outside of its
origin.

In the judgement, the act produces itself inside the discursive limits, and as
outside of itself. It puts itself as act stopping itself, but not in itself. And it is on account
of this that the enunciated is not the original act, it is in being and it participates to that,
in the essence is the act, the existence itself. In judgement, the original act radiates itself,
without which would not be, with which could not encounter the being which gives itself
to it through being known according to its essence and its singular act. The act of
judgement does not make existence; it recognises that which is; it assumes therefore
through the spirit that which is in itself, and recognises it as such.

Judgement is so, in its exercise, the space of an act more original than it gives
them its legitimacy, which affirms itself in it, and it is thus, in it, affirmed in act. The act
of judgement participates with the act of being, without which no judgement is possible.
And shows the act of being its intelligibility. It is thus the essence of this act, without
identifying itself with it, as the finite essence participates of the substance.

B. PARTICIPATION AND CAUSALITY.

Participation is thinkable because there it is a pure act identical to its essence.

Such act does not arrive at being deriving from an act more original of itself, but it is, in
its same essence, the act of being which makes being. The analogy of proportionality of
being fulfils itself here in the doctrine of participation.

1. The Spiritual Act.

Through the contingent spirit, which is not the master of the term of its act in the
world, therefore of the proper objective realisation, the distance is always insurmountable
between the act and that in which the act makes itself act. Through the contingent spirit,
the act is actuated by that which does not dominate it, by the irreducible objective reality

19
to that which is it. The act is so active making itself the receptivity of the proper
objectivity, potency.

In the ontological terms, it tells that the substance appears graceful to its essence;
the act of being effects itself graceful to its expression and to its intelligibility. Now in
origin, the essence is for the substance and it exists mediating this. It needs therefore to
exact an act in the essence would be adequate to the same substance. It is in fact in the
measure in which an act gives itself from itself the proper essence which can be
understood in which mode the spirit itself arrives, despite everything, to itself in an
essence, which nevertheless is not it. In the case of the act which gives itself the proper
essence, the essence is not objective and mundane, but the act itself, the origin of its
intelligibility, the origin which ought to be conceived as that which provokes
intelligibility of its act itself. The original act does not reach an essence which would
precede it; its essence is not in no case external to the act; it is the same movement. This
identity of the act with itself is reflectively experimented, although in the imperfect
manner.

The spiritual experience illumines the determinations of the ontology. The spirit
arrives to itself departing from that which is not it. Nevertheless, the opening to the
objectivity in which it realises its act is not originated in objectivity, but in itself.
Although if the spirit does not accomplish itself that grace to the offer of an essence
which is not it, it is nevertheless to the origin of its act. It is act. Now, in the measure in
which it does not come to itself through the objective essence, the spirit as act does not
pertains to its essence; it does not pertain, not even to itself, in the measure in which it is
act through its essence. It pertains therefore to the act from which comes any act; it has
in itself the cause of its act; it receives, as the essence is not the cause of its act, of its
substance, but it receives from it of being.

The doctrine of participation of the spirit to the act of being gives reason of the
spiritual act which exercises in the appropriate manner the act of being, and of the origin
of this spiritual act.

2. Causality.

The distinction between essence and existence, distinction which is to the origin
of our reflective analysis, leads so to reflect the participation in terms of causality: the
spirit participates to the pure act through being act, because it does not have from itself of
that equalising its act in its essence; it receives therefore of being act in as much as it is
essence or concrete effectivity; the causality expresses this receptivity of the act, while
the participation insists on the reality of the act proper and inalienable of the spirit.

The cause, in which the form is that of efficiency, indicates the action of an
existent on other existent, which communicates perfection. It is not a creator of being if
this receives perfection as an added effect. It can also generate a being in its proper
existence. The experience of cause is common. All obtain satisfaction of the elementary
need by accomplishing this gesture, to eat, to sleep. The applied science knows that it

20
cannot proceed without adequate instrument. As to the mathematical and formal sciences,
it could think itself that their formulation impedes the understanding of the subsistence of
caused existents, and that therefore they do not know that the principle of the formal
identity; but the relation of identity, the ultimate horizon of formalization, would be
empty and tautological if it does not include in itself terms essentially different connected
by a law of minimal implication. Theoretical sciences know also the principle of
causality.

It is important to grasp well the power of this principle. From the moment that any
existent is in act in itself, also imperfectly, it seems that this principle can not regard it in
its ground, but only in its added accidental appearances. Nevertheless, it can recognise a
donation which grounds, susceptible of communicating itself to other existent already
constituted and capable of receiving influence, and also simply because it is contingent
existent, in which the reason of being is not in its particular being.

Also if the experience teaches us that there it is causality in the world, it is not
clear to same mode the theoretical meaning of causality. The question consists in the
knowing that such is causality. It is not simply empirical, rather analytical. Certainly, the
cause, for such being, implies its effect in its same concept, it is in regard of the effect
conforms to that which can give it of itself. Nevertheless, the cause supposes that it
subsists in the singular manner that which receives synthetically its influence. The causal
relations can be established only on the basis of this subsistence. The principle of
causality is therefore analytical in as much as to its concept, but synthetic in as much as
to its real function. In as much as it is synthesis, it is called participation. In the case that
it interest us, it will be said that the existent exists through participation to that which
gives it its act. In other words, its substance is not analytically deduced from the first
causal act. But it does not follow that it subsists anteriorly to the cause; it is this on which
we propose of reflecting further.

3. Contingency and Act.

If the substances depend from their essences, the novelty of the essences implies
the novelty of the substances. The substances modify itself without rest, they emerge and
move, they unfold and corrupt, they settle and disappear in their proper unity. They are
not only accidents that fall, that come and go, but the substance has reached itself in its
permanent unity from that it comes and goes: an accident can kill or can save. Because
substantial being is not without its accidents, it can be said that it arrives at being
according to its accidents in which it actuates its act. Now the accidents are that through
which the substances come connected one to the other; by means of the accident the
substances act one on the other. The substance is not the master of its accidents,
moreover of itself. It is not simply the principle of itself. In other terms, the substance,
in itself, is not the proper origin. It is contingent.

The passivity of the substance confronted of its accidents is not such that the
accident would be the condition of the subsistence of the substance, as if the accident can
be to the origin of the act of being. The unity of existent in its act is not constituted by the

21
sum of that which succeeds it. None of the accidents conducts to uniting them in diverse
way than transversely, in the unity of the existent. Moreover, the accident is not the
proper origin of existence: it derives from the concrete substance its capacity to exist. The
accidents are not therefore the cause of the coming of the substance to existence. The
essence does not create the existent. But the contingent existent is not without essence
constituted by accidents, substantially or not.

Because the contingent substance is not the origin of itself, it has need of a cause
for the appearance of its being and for the disappearance of it. The substance is, and it is
that which is departing from that which it is not. Therefore, the principle of causality
reaches not only the accidental order, but also the substantial order. The substance is that
which is because it receives being from another substance. The substance of being always
new exists departing from a substance which communicates to it its perfection of being, a
participation of itself, in the manner which would be it. It concludes itself from the actual
contingency of being which exists an ontological passivity such that the causality must
rationally take the present of the act and not only its origin in time; it is proper now that
the contingent act is act; it is therefore further that receives it of being act; it is further
that the contingent act is actuated. Thus, the contingent act is in potency in the
confrontations of the act of original being, of an actual origin more than chronological.

4. Participation and Analogy.

The essence of the absolute act cannot be similar to whatever essence, in fact,
according to its definition, it is opened necessarily to a substance. To conceive the
absolute act in which the essence and existence are one as an essence, does not render
homage to the pure act. Certainly, we form an essence of the act purely present to itself,
and ought to be so because the essence is the necessary mediation because the substance
would be presented intelligibly to the spirit. But from the impossibility of thinking
diversely which through essence can not conclude itself that thought does not reach that
of the nude essence. On the contrary, it is necessary to think that in the essence to which
it sees thought can present itself an existent substance. The problem is therefore of
knowing as rising from the essence of the substance in the case of the act purely present
to itself. This access is legitimate not logically, but ontologically, because the contingent
existent, although it does not exist simply “ex” (out of) itself, it exists nevertheless proper
in itself, in the manner specific and inalienable, but received.

Finally to understand this paradoxical appearance, the reflection on the analogy of

proportionality is precious; it allows an understanding of that which is the hereafter of
essence. It hardly integrates the analogy of attribution, it takes its point of departure to the
internal structure of judgement where it is exercised and placed the act of being. The
spirit accords itself to the intelligibility of being through the way of abstraction; the
abstracted comes to the subject, from what the spirit separates it and to what it conjoins in
its judgement; the substance opens itself so to the attributed abstract intelligibility; it s
moreover the conclusion of a affirmable synthesis. In judgement, the subject and
predicate are connected synthetically, concrete substance and abstracted essence;
certainly, the enunciated of judgement, which is composed, separates the subject from its

22
essence; but this separation is at the service of the synthesis; overcoming the abstraction
of the predicate, the affirmation recognizes the intelligibility of the substance itself. The
analogy of attribution of being is implied in the whole of our objective affirmation, in as
much as the subject, which is, is intelligible.

The enunciated is not without the unifying act, the analytic separation without
synthetic composition. The relation of the analysis to the synthesis is covered by the
analogy of being. The judgement separates in fact the abstracted from the subject; but
because there it is not nothing outside of being, the abstract is itself in the being; now
being which reunites in itself every being, also ideal, it is itself abstracted, esse
pauperimum. In as much as the objective synthesis which commits the intelligible being
to the being, it agrees to this abstracted its concrete root overcomes the “esse
pauperimum and becomes the “esse commune”.

Now in the affirmation, where it is exercised the analogy of attribution, a

proportion is proposed. The judgement of attribution separates that which the unites; the
affirmation is at the same time analytic and synthetic - the fullness of the act of
affirmation in its judgement is not therefore which in proportion of its proper act in
confrontation of the act purely in its essence. The relation of the “esse commune” to
substantial being is synthetic in the affirmation. But the affirmation does not itself
actuates than in the enunciated. And it is because that it is not the origin of its fullness, of
the unity which contains in itself. It concludes itself from that which the identity of the
act is such through the participation to that which the affirmation is not through itself.
The affirmation is contingent in its essence and in its act, in as much as it actuates a unity.
This is therefore transcendental, and it is not measure by the affirmation in the
enunciation of its act.

The analogy of attribution concerns the enunciated of judgement, and the analogy
of proportionality its act. The analogy of proportionality establishes a relation of two
proportions; these come delineated between the act and the essence. The human act of
affirmation exercises a transcendental act in its essential enunciated. It must elevate itself
to thought of an act, which is the fullness of the presence to itself in its essence and grace
to which the act of affirmation is effective synthesis. The thought, a condition of
returning on its act effectively presented, it elevates itself therefore to the affirmation of
an act, which gives itself adequately in its essence.

But first analysing this act as such we will show in which mode the analogy of
proportionality consents of thinking a participation hierarchized of beings. We will return
in the objective manner that which we have discovered in our analysis of judgement.

C. THE HIERARCHY OF BEINGS.

The doctrine of participation leads to thinking a hierarchy among beings

according to which they accomplish more or less the identity which the pure act is
through itself. There are two possible types of hierarchical structures, according to

23
essence, according to existence, one which concerns the intelligibility of the existents, the
other their existential reality.

1. The Logical and Ontological Hierarchy of Beings.

The logical method of the hierarchy of beings considers the category that allow
diversifying them one from the others. They differentiate themselves fundamentally
through their proper substance, through that which they in themselves; in this sense, the
“being” first of all says itself of the substance. But also the accidents are; inherent to the
substance, they do not have being from themselves, but departing from the substance’
they are therefore secondarily.

A hierarchy of beings can be established considering how the existents form,

together formal more or less broad; these grouping are called specie or genus, in the
measure that the second integrate the first joining them to the others. The specie and the
universal genus, logical concepts, render intelligible the universal of the existents; the
ultimate intelligible, the abstract concept of being, is longer from the substance, esse
pauperimum. Now the pure act is not a genus more general of its specie. It is not enough
therefore to say that, being any being of being, the categories are of being on the example
of the genus and of the specie; such manner of considering being is not that formal.

The categories pertain to being as aspects of the existent in which they subsist and
not as logical and universal categories. The category is in the existent. It classifies the
accidents. The accident receives therefore the being of this in which the category subsists.
The abstract being is disguise in the universal and indeterminate idea of the substantial
foundation which exists. Nevertheless, the substance is relational, because it is its
accidents. The relation, conceived in this manner and not according to abstraction, is
constitutive of existent. The category, which subsists in the existent, and grace to that
existent is real for the spirit, it manifests the immanent relationality of the substance. The
category, therefore, is a mode of being; its relation with the existent is not that logical.

The concrete existent is not actuated through us, meaning to say accessible, which
mediates the categories. Nevertheless, the actuation of being in its act comes first and
renders possible the second, that of the accident and of its category. If in a sense, in fact,
the existent is logically in potency in confrontation of the formal categories, these are
ontologically in potency in the existent which assumes them. So the categories are real in
being, and not only formal, if the act of being communicates to them being, meaning to
say it gives them participation to its act.

In the same mode, the analogy of attribution, logical, is based ontologically from
the participation which the being gives of its act to its essence, and this according to the
analogy of proportionality. This analogy gives the place to the ontological hierarchy of
beings according to the series: mineral, vegetal, animal, human, or: being, living,
thinking; these two series are repetitive; “to live” joins in fact vegetal and mineral. In any
of these series, the successive term supposes, through being, which would be the
preceding term, while the preceding term does not imply the successive term.

24
 2. The Mineral.

In the ontological hierarchical series, being seems to indicate ‘esse pauperimum’.

That which is, in fact, simply, without the other, distinguishes itself from the rest through
the absence of whatever determination; in this sense, the mineral symbolizes the form
more indeterminate of that which is. Nevertheless, this form receives the accidents of
place, of time, common to all beings; the mineral is not therefore ‘esse pauperimum’ or
the naked substance, devoid of all accidents. The mineral, in fact, is and presents itself
according to the multiple contours of its appearance.

These appearances are the preoccupation of the natural sciences, which recognize
the immense progress due to their formalization, meaning to say their putting in
parenthesis the singularity of existence. However the scientific abstraction does not leave
untouched the mineral existents; the rational aspects of the existents, in fact, cannot be
without substance. Nonetheless, natural sciences do not exhaust the real substance placed
in its accidents. The scientific laws are provisionary, the researches never circumscribed
in some rational determinations established and confirmed. Sciences are helped with laws
from meanings more hermeneutic than legal. It progresses from accidents to the
substance, from being to appearing, from legal to factual, from existent to its essence.
The interdiction of the aspect exclusively legal is enunciated by the incompleteness of the
abstractions. The being, also mineral, is very complex for exhausting itself in terms of
only one of its appearances.

The mineral being transcends its abstracted accidents. However, the success of
sciences, which manipulate the existent reducing it to one of its abstractions, manifest the
fragility of the mineral; the existence is in fact is this so related to the essence that its
transcendence is not acquired than rationally; reason holds in custody the secret of being
in the measure of its attention, of the modesty of its conquered known in their partiality,
in their provisionary character.

It disposes itself to identify the mineral being with this rock which the hammer of
splitting rocks crush into pulverized substance by its destructive force. The mineral
substance is however that assemblage without particularity, formed by all the atoms of
carbon, by all the metals, already abstracted unity of simple bodies, which do not exist in
pure state. It is the end of intellectual investigation, broader in relation to the sensible.
Nothing in particular extracts itself from it to the outside of the appearance of the rock;
the totality of the mineral world hides within to the physical and chemical formula in
which the studious wish to contain it.

3. The Vegetable.

The living is also mineral and science applies itself to it as it applies itself to the
mineral; but the substantial center of the existent rests outside of its appearance for
becoming the original principle.

25
 The living rises in relation to the mineral. It constitutes itself by itself; the body,
live but wounded, tries to constitute its unity to the extreme of its capacity; it tends also to
propagate itself. Becoming itself, in the essential manner and not in the superfluous
mode, other existents, distinct from it and in the level of propagating itself. Life generates
life; dividing itself, it multiplies itself, in equal unity to itself. Life is not mineral, passive;
it gives itself to itself, to other livings. Its fecundity comes from a foundation of which
the effects ascertain themselves, of which it reconstitutes itself the way. Departing from
this foundation, the living guarantees the unity of its appearance, of its body, and
multiplies itself giving life. Everything falls as if the unity, which rises in any living,
reconstituted in the harmony of its proportions according to the need, devoted until death.
The unity of the living is therefore assured by living itself, but by its posterity. With the
rest, the same living reveals the identity of who generates it. The interior light to living,
or its substance flees from any part to mortal through guaranteeing its corporeal
appearance in which it manifests a provisionary unity.

Everything comes as if the living, which does not have other destiny but death,
construct its unity through multiplying itself in its decadence. The reparation of the
wounded body sees to better the multiplication of itself. With this scope, life gives birth
to an incredible sum of possibilities, of which only some become real. The becoming of
living begins with a choice. Living generates an imposing quantity of cells of which only
some would reach maturation. Its origin is a reservoir of indefinite energy; the origin of
real life submerges thus in a secret not entirely inert, but prodigiously energetic.

However, it belongs properly to the being revealing itself. The appearance of the
living is no other than its being. Life that does not manifest itself is dead. The law of the
mineral extends thus its power on the living; but the appearance of the living does not
consign itself without resistance to the violence of that which manipulates and mutilates
it; the living appearance reveals an irreducible substance to the mineral, a mode of being
where the act is superabundance in its body and in its descendants. But the vegetable does
not truly exist but in its posterity. Its act is not truly its own.

4. The Animal.

The animal is so exposed in its appearances, minerals, which leaves itself to attain
when it touches itself the one or the other of its aspects; however, living, it reacts to the
wound and to the caresses. It does not exist without including the mineral order, but if it
rather withdraws as the vegetable; as the plant, it comes from an origin which it is not and
sustains in itself by reproducing itself; its identity is thus outside of itself. However, its
interior unity is more stable of that of the vegetable. The animal manifest in its behaviour
a withdrawing itself, a mystery whose principle is in itself. It is in fact capable of
becoming dangerous, of protecting itself, of guarding its own life; it takes what is
necessary for its own needs, confronted with the situation that is difficult and complex;
all unfolds as if the animal would have a certain immediate knowledge of itself and of its
fragility.

26
 Mediating the knowledge of itself, the interiority of being becomes a unity which
more abstract, abandoned to the case of cosmic impacts, it is not only placed iutside of
itself, abstracted by the proper constitutive principle, but present to itself in the manner
greatly indistinct. The interior richness which the living testimony reveals itself at the
same time in which it creates itself a way of appearance; in the animal this unity tends to
demonstrate itself to itself; it becomes a sort of susceptible knowledge of organizing its
world to the advantage of itself. In the mineral world, the accident administers and
imposes its laws to the changed substance; in the living, the accident is moved across
from the substance as if it did not make the measure of life; with the animal knowledge of
itself exposes itself at the same moment in which it appears, it identifies itself with its
exteriority.

This project manifests the care of its life and of its being. The appearance is
willed to the service of an interiority which ought itself to carry in its fullness first of able
to affirm that which to it it convenes or not. The content of animal knowledge is
immersed in its behaviours from which we will infer it. Its evident behaviours are the
fruit of a mode of taking sensorialy the world; however, the interiority is determined in as
much as it regards its doing proper from the perceptive response to the world which
surrounds it. The animal sensation is not different from the human sensation; the
sensorial organ of the animal is characterized by the reflexive act, which the human organ
knows to same way. That which varies is this or that type of sense, but without able to
prove it, the perception, or the subjective response to the sensorial information. We
cannot know the way with which the animal perceives effectively, rather that which
listens again in its subjectivity when it is happy and when it suffers; there is here a limit
which belongs to the same structure of the intersubjective relations.

Nothing allows affirming or of invalidating that the subjectivity so placed would

be a reflexive knowledge of itself; we cannot follow the way explicitated of the auto
consciousness of the animal. The knowledge of itself is in the level of taking itself
objectifying and making explicit return on this objectivization of itself. The animal
objectifies its sentiments. However, but it cannot speak when it wills, and as it wills. The
animal is free in its movements; its perception is determined from this liberty, which it is
through itself; but it is not on the level from itself of inspiring departing from itself an
adequate language in which it could present through itself the surging of its act. The
animal is free, but in the necessity, because its liberty responds to a solicitation, which it
does measure, but in which it puts its subjectivity.

5. The Human.

The human participates in the mineral, of the vegetable and of the animal. As
mineral, it is vulnerable to all that which hurts it, body and soul; as vegetative, its
interiority tends to realize itself outside of itself, to go beyond death; as animal, it
responds to the solicitations of the world departing from itself and adapting itself. But the
human being manifests its irreducibility in terms of its explicit knowledge of itself, a
disposition of itself.

27
 The animal has knowledge of the situations and of its engagements itself in them,
a perceptive knowledge, but without language nor explicit reflection. Human knowledge
is knowledge of itself in the explicit and reflective manner; he knows he is responsible of
himself, coinciding with itself in the thought in which it objectifies himself. “ I think,
therefore I am.” The thought is in the level of explaining in propositions in which it
objectifies outside itself; in this objectivization, the spirit recognizes its identity and it
refers it to itself: “ I think”. The reflective return of the thought towards itself departing
from its proposition in which it reveals its being, it delineates the space where the act
becomes its objectivity, and its objectivity to its original being. Thus, in the expression: “
I think”, the spirit proclaims simultaneously, in act: “I am”. The knowledge contains in
itself the capacity of measuring its expression with its act, meaning to say the adequation
to itself in that which it is not. If the spirit can return to itself expressing the knowledge of
itself in this expression and not in that other, it is because it is always present to itself,
light for itself.

The appearance of the spirit in the proposition becomes contemporary to the

manifestation of its being as act. To know itself is not exhausted in the ignorance of a
given thing and in the inexpressible, also if the instruments of knowing and of the
expressions are not determined by the consciousness alone of itself. The interiority of
spiritual proposition avoids the necessity, which would produce induction moving from
the appearance. “I think, therefore I am” expresses the identity of thought and its being in
the expression and in the interiority, departing from this interiority which expresses itself,
the act of thought that proposes itself objectively. The norm of the sense is not the
expression, but the offered objectivity which, proposing itself, arrive to itself.

The verbal coating of the spirit, the sensible sign of subjectivity, is not created by
the spirit. It remains the fruit of conventions. The spirit does not arrive to the
consciousness of itself than mediating these. And it is on account of consciousness of
itself, principally, arising from being, it is never reached as such, it intuits in the
proposition. The spiritual substance consigns itself in its appearance, but never without
being itself abandoned to the principle itself; the proposition of self cannot transgress the
necessity imposed to the spirit of consigning itself in that, which does not measure. The
spirit arrives to itself passing across all mediations of history that it finds itself facing
through love or through force, but not necessarily. In same way the spiritual mystery does
not cancel itself from the proposition of itself: the consciousness of self is achieved by
the reflective return of its proper act. The spirit recognizes thus its presence at same time
as it reaches outside itself.

The spirit reaches itself to the conditions of getting lost in that which it is strange.
The price of interiority is calculated on the basis of the capacity of exteriorizing itself
receiving to itself that which it is not and in which it expresses its act of going out from
self. In this reception, the spirit arrives to itself finally. Thus, proposing itself, the spirit
does not alienate itself. It would be this case if the proposition makes manifest of itself,
without any rest, in the appearance. The spirit is the origin of its proposition. This origin
cannot be expressed in its proposition without there being implied. To occur therefore
which the spirit could propose itself in the systems of expression without being abducted

28
to itself. The system of language is not available for freedom, but it is not such which
manifested by the word, spoken; the language does not exist than for the one who speaks
it; the compulsions of expressions are not such that the subjectivity cannot create the
originality of its being.

The mineral existence is so abstract, as evoked in its essence, and its withdrawing
traces the space opened for scientific research; the vegetative existence uproots itself
from its individual essence, but without joining itself to itself; the animal existence is
presence of self to self, but which loses itself in an objective essence; finally, the human
existence uproots itself from her/his objective essence through confirming here her/his
presence to itself. S/he perceives thus a dialectics of the distinction between essence and
existence; the existence here receives a fullness of presence to itself always better. The
analogy of proportionality invites us then for elevating the dialectics as far as to the
affirmation of the existence, which gives itself to itself in an identical essence to itself.
Through linking to such point of the dialectics, there is a need to reflect the movement,
which leads to it. The existence would not be more than which comes from self departing
that which is not, but would be that which gives itself to self departing from self and in
itself. Its essence would be its act itself, the gift without recovery of self.

II. THE TRANSCENDENTALS.

Transcendental is an idea which makes being consistent in its esse (act of being),
and not as genus, specie or individual. The transcendental concepts, simply considered in
itself, indicate the act of being. They are convertible one with the others, because they see
being in its simplicity. They are not distinguished therefore as transcendentals by an
analysis of being considered in itself, because it is existentially simple, but according to
the mode in which it gives itself. Unity is the first transcendental because being presents
itself in its simple unity. The two other transcendentals, namely truth and goodness, are
distinct in the relation between being and the spirit two moments which are the
intelligibility of being true and good of its presence to the spirit.

A. The Unity of Being.

1. Logical Unity and Ontological Unity.

The unity of being seems first of all to conform to the logical principle of identity
(univocity): that which is, is, and cannot be thought adequately in the different way. The
unity of being excludes that which is other, meaning to say that which logically does not
belong to its essence. In this manner, the unity of being concerns the being determined
through exclusion, and not according to the “esse” understood analogically, meaning to
say according to the unity determined by its proper origin, departing from itself.

Logic is the norm of ontology; on the contrary. Where logic is linked with
ontology, in judgement, it needs to recognize that the unity of being is required by the
pretext to the objectivity of our affirmations. The diversity of logical predicates comes to

29
being it; this is not disintegrated, not shattered. Cetainly, being is not judged without
being predicated. Our points of view which determined these predicates are multiple; but
being there presents itself really itself. And it is on account of this that the unity of being
cannot be a particular aspect besides other particular aspects; it must be penetrated
internally that which is partial perspective of being on which our judgements rest. Thus,
we can only speak of partial judgement on reality considering the excess of reality itself.

The essential unity present itself in the diversity of its appearances. Any of our
particular points of view gathers it that however it resulted as the sum total of our points
of view; the essential unity is in fact irreducible to them. Being is in act, presenting
interiorly in its essence indestructible in our points of view. The unity of being is
fundamentally that of its “esse”. The essence is not such that the existence connects itself
as an element added; the existent penetrates its essence as that which there presents itself
in the intelligibility. The unity of being evokes therefore the unification mediating the
“esse” of the possible fractionization of its intelligibility. The unity of being is thus
founded in the unity of its “to be”.

Of this active presence of being in its indestructible unity, judgement is in its

enunciation active and intelligible. The reason of judgement is that which is; the act
mediating which existent consigns itself in its essence is the measure of the act of
judgement pressed into a sensed proposition. The essence is not the same principle of this
unity. The exigency of intelligibility of being does not stop itself to the consensus of the
unity of the indestructible unity in diverse enuciations, but it arrives to recognize that
which is actively present in the essence for which the spirit destined to the one it declares,
meaning to say to the simplicity of “esse”, i.e. of the act of being.

2. Transcendental Unity.

The unity of being is transcendental. Being is in fact analogously identical to itself

in every existent. The doctrine of transcendental unity of being implies the analogy of
being. The univocity of the unity would mean no difference among beings is
ontologically founded; thus, we will be led to radical monism and absolutely it lacks
meaning of sensible and concrete experience. The transcendental unity of being is not
equivocal. The unity of being is therefore analogical.

The act that is in being must be reflected as presence of itself to itself and for
itself. To exist as act, proper as act, is the origin and the explanation of this origin in
itself. To exist is the capacity of manifesting itself in its essence, in such a way that its
essence is proportionate actively to it. The unity of the act is not all static and only
logical; it is complete activity, overcoming itself, for itself and in itself. The “esse
commune” does not to itself than in its presence to its essence. This unity is analogical,
according to the proportionality. The act of being, in fact, is in itself diverse, from the
poverty of the mineral being, as far as the requirement of the presence to itself, identical
to itself, which man inaugurates in itself in an incomplete manner; in man in fact the act
can be reflected in its expression, but its expression is extraneous. The human act

30
therefore not entirely to the principle of itself, one, in consideration of its cosmic root
and of its interior distance between itself and that in which it arrives to itself.

The unity of being is therefore transcendental; it is present in proportional manner

in all that which is; it is of for itself identical to being which, in its essence, is active
presence to itself. The definition of unity is so realized more in the human act. Logically
it is one that which is in itself undivided and distinct from another thing. The being which
manifest itself in its essence is one because its act is not other than its essence; its essence
would not be without its act; but the essence of the act of being one must be simple, as it
is simple the act which is from itself the proper origin. The indivisibility of being has not
therefore a sense simply notional or logical, adequate to the principle of identity; it
concerns the fecundity of the act of being in its emergence. But beings are multiple, and
divided in themselves. All that which is not the act of original being is originated in that,
to which it participates. The unity of the transcendental act of being evokes therefore its
ontological causality.

The ontological causality explains its fundamental sense to the articulation of the
two transcendentals, which are truth and goodness. Being one gives itself in fact to being;
thus it accords its foundation to the disconnected beings by themselves in as much as
their essence is not the reason of their existence. The contingent unity of essence and of
existence does not have its reason in a natural proportion of one to the other; being one
accords in fact to beings of being interiorly to their essence, and not in the disconnected
manner. The truth in which we recognize the foundation of beings therefore ought to
touch the act of being because this is in agreement to the intelligence which tends to it;
the good renders possible the truth of things by the fact that it indicates precisely that act
by means of which the being receives of being, meaning to say the act through which it
gives itself and it is pleasant or agreeable presence to being.

B. The Truth of Being.

What is truth, what is being true? Pontius Pilate may have mocked, but really the
question mocks our own self-satisfaction. It will forever shake our metaphysical
perplexity. The thrust of our self-transcending is an orientation to truth. The denial of
truth cannot twist free of the embrace of truth. There is no escape from the true. The
difficult task is interpreting the metaphysical meaning of this necessity. 2

The question of truth is ontological/metaphysical. The truth has been denied in

fvor of what is true for us. There is no truth, there are truths for us. This is true in what it
includes, and untrue in what is excludes. If the thrust of self-transcendence is an
orientation to truth, this thrust is genuinely self-transcending in its willingness to be for
the other. The true is not only for us, but it may be for us to transcend ourselves to the
truth as it is for itself. Self-transcendence is not the master of truth; it may be the servant

2
Ibid. p. 463

31
of the true in its going towards it otherness - that is, in its openness to what is true in and
for itself. Being truthful may be an agapeic service of the true. 3

We do not possess absolute truth, nor are we devoid of relation to truth. We have
neither the bliss of the beast's ignorance not the blessedness of the god's gnosis. Placed in
between these extremes, the thrust of mindful self-transcendence is subjected to the stress
of extremes. We know we do not know the absolute truth, yet we know, and hence are
not cut off from, the truth we clearly do not possess. We are other to the truth, yet
necessarily related to it in its otherness, and hence the truth as other is intimate to the
thrust of our transcending. Our desire for truth anticipates what presently it lacks; but
what it anticipates is not just a goal out there. The goal is already at work in the trajectory
of self-transcendence towards that goal. We desire what we lack and in desire anticipate
the truth. 4

The concern here is not only with cognitive truth - namely, the fidelity of mind to
being - but with ontological truth - namely, a being's being true to being. Being true in the
ontological sense comes to mean the exemplification of the community of being in the
true being itself. The word community here is stress relative to truth. The idea of private
truth is not enough, though we must seek an understanding adequate to both the intimacy
and the universality of truth. Such community would be beyond subjectivism that is false
to being in its otherness. It would be beyond an objectivism that reductive of being's
otherness, forgetful of the self. 5

Being true will be as plurivocal as being is. We normally consider truth of being
relative to the human being, but there is no reason for this restriction to our mindfulness.
Rather our mindfulness ought to be as open as possible to the truth of being. The
qualification must come from the truth of being itself, not from a prior contraction of the
notion of truth to what is true for us. This last corrupts the notion of truth. 6

However, the plurivocity of being true does not only stand against a relativism
that says "there is no truth," but states that different modes of being true are true in
relation to the different sense of being. When the equivocal is acknowledged, there are
other demands made on being true. The dialectic and the metaxological views do not
shirk this challenge. Beyond the truth of univocal being, the unavoidable demands of
truth to self turn us more towards the truth of the existential, the ethical, the religious, the
philosophical. 7

The unity which is being in act consigns itself in its essence, meaning to say
intelligibly. In as much as the one act consigns itself intelligibly, it is true.

3
ibid. p. 463.
4
Ibid. p. 464
5
ibid 466
6
ibid 465
7
ibid 466

32
 1. The Intelligibility of Being.

Being is necessarily intelligible. The intelligibility of being is in fact principal.

Outside of it, no act of knowledge is possible. It would be absurd to pretend that being
would be in principle unintelligible; such pretext, in fact, would imply the intelligibility
of the unintelligibility; the premise outside of which would draw unintelligibility of being
can not be than intelligible. There is here a necessity for thought.

This formal reflection evidences a primordial and necessary relation between

being and the spirit thinking. The spirit cannot rise above its shadow. It affirms and
judges its assertions recognizing reflectively that which it engages itself there; it reaches
in the same mode the rational formality of the affirmable and judgementable. Therefore,
being is necessarily intelligible in the same moment in which the mind thinks of it; it first
transcendental character is this intelligibility for the spirit which tends, by means of
discourse and reflection, to grasping it.

The intelligibility is the characteristic of every being in as much as it is. It would

be to ignore the necessity immanent to the reflection reserving in the being an intelligible
zone, inaccessible to the spirit. That the thing “in se” cannot be controlled by a particular
science does not mean that it would not be sensed for the spirit, therefore intelligible. To
exist, which we distinguish from essence, is not for us without essence - here the risk of
essentializing the existence; of the rest, pure existence, in which our contingent existence
participates, is not without essence; we cannot think of pure act if not in our words;
moreover, pure act, through being acted, consigns itself adequately in its essence. To
recognize then an existent as existent, for the spirit, is the same thing as consigning an
essence, meaning to say an intelligible determination. It is for this reason through which
we recognise being its unity: the unity of being is the determination of its existence in as
much it is intelligible. It is not a determination between others; it is that in which all the
determinations addresses themselves effectively to being which unites them in itself
penetrating them all.

The intelligibility of being does not mean that the spirit would be the measure of
that which exists. Certainly, being is grasped according to the possibility of that which
grasps it. Therefore, it must be intelligible to be grasped according to the intelligence. In
this perspective, the distinction between essence and existence, as distinction, could
assume an erroneous meaning. Essence would be intelligibility of the substance, and in
opposition to existence an infinity of intelligible, an unintelligible. However, the
distinction between essence and existence is inscribed internal to the act of knowledge
and of its movement of transcendence. If the spirit is in the level of passing the essence
towards existence, of knowing the intelligibility apparent of existence, it is because its
dynamism is limited to the opening of its understanding to the essence and that existence
is also intelligible. The dynamism of the intelligence responds in fact to being the
intelligibility of which is not exhausted by the resource of the determined knowledge.

No essence is accessible to the spirit outside of its determination, but no

determination exhausts the offered which being makes of itself to the spirit gracefully to

33
its essence. Every determination is a point of view, in no exclusive mode of other
possible determination, but which includes virtually these determinations in its mode
itself of gathering. The spirit knows the multiplicity of its point of view and the unity of
being which sustain them actively. The concrete, in its existence itself, remains
inexhaustible.

2. Truth, Correspondence, and Univocity

There is operative, in the dynamism of self-transcending, an immediate

community of mind and truth. It is this immediacy that generates the common sense
conviction that really there is no question of truth at all. We are so implicated in the
embrace of truth that the question of its nature does not arise at all. But since we
mindfully inhabit this community and because mind is dynamic, the immediacy of the
elemental will articulate its richness. Inevitably, the immediate givenness of this
community will dominate our reflective considerations. Thus relative to reflective
accounts, we find perhaps the most ancient and persisting notion of truth - namely, that it
consists in a certain correspondence between mind and a state of affairs holding in
actuality. 8

Here, the univocal notion of being influences the thinking of truth. We find
versions of it in all ages, Plato and Aristotle in the ancient world, Aquinas in the
medieval, Moore and Russel in our not so recent times. Carried in the immediate
community of mind and being, common sense claims that the mind simply conforms to
the being of things in an immediate, passive receptivity, as a mirror assumes the shape of
the object reflected. Philosophers will tend to speak of the adequation of intellect and
thing. 9

The correspondence view of truth is not wrong, but it starts too late. This is
initially a naïve view, which is the overflow of the immediate community of being and
mind. But the immediacy, in fact, has already been mediated by a very determinate sense
of what being and mind are. Since this view is defined by univocity, being and mind are
already understood to be two fixed realms. Correspondence holds between a mental and
an ontological determination. These determinations are as univocally precise and clear-
cut as possible. Here the immediate community of mind and being is generally
determined according to some version of the doctrine of external relations. Mind is "in
here", reality is "out there". Truth is a correspondence between the "in here" and the "out
there". Truth, then, is an extrinsic relation between two univocally fixed determinacies. 10

C. The Goodness of Being.

Mediating the truth, being is presented to the spirit in the manner that it can be
assimilated, although in its act, it always transcends its concept. The affirmation by
means of which recognizes itself that the essence exists, expresses spiritually an originary

8
ibid 467
9
ibid 467
10
ibid 467-68

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gift. The work of the constitution of the concept and of judgment is not finalized by this
immanence. Knowledge sees to know that which is, and the elaboration of the immanent
elements is to the service of the knowledge of transcendent being. And it is because of
that affirmation of being as it is, it is a good for knowledge.

1. Good and Perfection.

The good appears as perfection. The idea of the perfection is that of a fullness of
the identity of self, It is perfect being which has all that which ought to be. The perfection
of a being is defined by the integrality of its constitutive notes. Beings are more or less
perfect according to which they verify more or less their generic or specific definition.

Seen in this manner, the idea of perfection is simply attributive; the values are
expressed in this case by the sum of their determination; these are regulated by the idea of
a perfect applied ideally to the existent. In as much as the perfection concerns ideality, it
expresses the dynamism across what the spirit refers the existent to a norm. Such
perfection regards the contingent beings only.

The perfection has also an existential sense. The ultimate perfection of a being, in
fact, is that it is, its esse. The existent is not good by the principle in function of a referent
to an ideal norm, but by reason of that which it is. In fact, it is not only its essence, its
quidditative notes.

The good concerns the fact of being in act; the ideal essence itself is conceived in
act, as this in which the act is in act, as the fruit of the act in its abundance and in its
activity itself. Although there cannot be satisfaction of defining the good by means of the
essence in which the act presents itself and configures itself. If the ideal is a good, it is
not as ideal, but by the reason of the act, which consigns to it its identity, which in it
renders itself intelligible, and so accessible. The ideal is good by means of the act which
it gives itself.

The idea of the good determines itself when departing from the movement that the
being in act is for itself. To exist in act is to suppose in act, effectively, in the same
manner that the spirit becomes to self, placing itself for the mediation of the essence; to
exist is placing itself for the mediation of a consistent alterity. In lack of this alterity, it
could not place itself truly itself. Being becomes to self, placing itself in its essence; it
accords itself so with its plenitude suspending its act without however negating itself. The
perfection of being consists in its realization in an essence; the perfection of the essence
is the perfect expression of the act.

The ideal perfection concerns the contingent beings only; it testifies the
inadequacy of the essence and of the existence, the irreducibility of existence limited in
its intelligible essence. It leaves to presage the computed structure of being in which the
essence is the perfection of the act itself of existence, meaning to say the act of existence
itself. We can consider thus the analogy of good as the transcendental good assumes it.

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 2. The Analogy of the Good

Knowledge sees a good. It is in fact a dynamism totally aesthetic in as much as its

end. This dynamism is exercised thanks to the conceptual mediation through that which
towards which tends the knowledge is cultivated interiorly; the dynamism of knowledge
gathers thus its object according to a subjective possibility universally favorable to the
conceptual abstraction. However, the intellect knows the limit of its knowledge, the
notion of this limit animates its research. The good of knowledge would be distributed if
the assimilation interiorly by means of the concept could not make the ascent to being in
its transcendence. The movement of knowledge looks in fact to being in its inalienable
transcendence. It is good for knowledge assimilating being in as much as it is, because it
is good for it opening itself to that which it does not dominate. Knowledge is strained
between the interiority of the concept and its end, the consensus of transcendence; it
guarantees in its act this tension; it is not in itself the reason. Knowledge ought therefore
to be based more on the act that it itself; the good to which it sees is not measured by its
power, but there it gives itself actively to the end of being interiorized.

The good concerns also the voluntary dynamism. The will sees in fact the being to
which it joins in the aesthetic manner. The good which transcends it does not leave itself
assimilating in its tension; in fact, it exist in an irreducible manner for all that of which it
is not the principle. The will, the movement of which is called love, goes to the unique.
The good is not only that which the will can agree to itself, but it is that which it agrees
by itself. The ecstasy of the will has no other measure than the donation of the good for
itself and the hope that in this gift the existent agrees itself freely to freedom, in a gesture
of goodness, which the will cannot produce nor circumscribe in its limits. The good is not
the perfection the will, if not for the fact that it invites the will to usher by itself through
gathering the offered and confirms this ecstasy, giving it the peace of anyone who
possesses all in the loved one.

The good applies itself properly to the analogy of proportionality. This articulates
the essence and existence, meaning to say the movement towards that act of being giving
itself in its essence. The inorganic beings do not present much of the intrinsic value; the
good that they offer is attributed by reason of their use; they are not very prolific that
their presence to itself is not recognized, no possibility of giving itself in their essence.
Because a being is intrinsically good, it can give itself departing from itself. The living
being defines the firs level of goodness, in as much as it gives itself; however, in this gift,
it loses itself totally; the vegetative does not subsist outside of itself. The animal arrives at
a certain knowledge of itself; it places itself at the beginning of its behaviours; it can
choose between more goods, and it can be happy or sad, but if the animal objectifies itself
in its behaviours, it could not return to itself, reflectively, taking into possession of itself.

Only the human being, in the level of knowing herself/himself and of

communicating oneself, has the capacity of the good for itself. Only s/he has the capacity
of gathering into its proper unity, can tend towards the relation that it is in itself and that
it gives itself from itself. In this perspective, the human being does not tend towards a
good that they could utilize, but towards the profundity of being which reveals its equal.

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The human good is however never proportionate to the act of giving. Thus, there is a
need of ascending again towards a more elevated good act.

3. The Transcendentality of the Good.

Good is a transcendental. In fact, all that which is is good in as much as it is,

because being, in as much as act, gives itself. Therefore, it does follow that, giving itself,
being realizes itself as act and arrives at the identity of the self to self, the perfection of
that which it is according to its essence.

The act of being is no other than the possession of itself as being. Giving itself,
because, being realizes and completes its being; it manifests thus its originary interiority;
as it returns to this manifestation it enriches itself of the gift which here realizes itself,
because this realization fills itself necessarily of the origin which here explains itself. In
the acting, being communicates itself; communicating itself, it manifests the
superabundance of its energy; it unveils its fecundity in the same way that it holds it in
store in its origin; it reveals, under the form of difference, its fecundity; for this same fact,
it confirms its origin.

The value of existence derives from its esse, which communicates itself and
constitutes itself thus as originary esse. Because the value of the existent is not
constituted by an ideal perfection, but by the act of the essence, it becomes existent
according to its proper composition. An existent that is made to derive from the esse
would not be existing nor desirable; it would not be presented than formal data; an
existent in which the esse does not appear to itself for communicating itself would not be
truly communicable, gift of self; it would be abstract and isolated.

The esse communicates itself. It appears to itself, not as something alien where it
perceives itself outside of itself, but in itself, communicated in the movement of
communication. In the same way, the esse appears to itself in the goodness of its act. The
esse manifests itself as good; for it is good to exist and itself is good in its same act of
communication of self. Goodness diffuses itself from itself. Thus, giving itself, being
arrives at the full measure of its goodness; it places itself at the same time in its origin
always superabundantly, unique in this superabundance.

And it is because being renders itself true in its appearing, and good because it
gives itself in its appearing. The reason of truth is the goodness of being. But the
goodness does not have other reasons than itself, which is the communication of itself.
Being is good in its foundation, in its originary esse; it is love, gift of itself without other
reason than the identity of itself, which communicates itself. The appearing is not only
because of truth, but also good. It is good in as much as the esse here gives itself; it is true
in as much as the good seals the presence of the esse, its appearing. The perfection of
being is no other than the total presence of the esse to its appearing.

The perfection of being defers to the gift which the esse of itself in its appearing,
in which it realizes itself and can contemplate the fecundity of that which it is in itself.

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The idea of perfection therefore is interior to the esse in as much as act; it concerns
analogically the beings, which are not unified in them. The perfect being gives itself in
the visibility through itself. Nevertheless, this gift would not be if it exhaust itself in one
donation of itself; the fecundity of the esse is guaranteed by the distinction that separates
the esse from its appearing. The gift of itself in its essence in which the esse
communicates itself without rest in the manner renewed is sign of the irreducibility of the
esse in respect to its appearing. The good is always in the way of realization of living
struggle of gathering itself, and this without wishing itself to recover. Being is good
because it gives itself graciously, in a disinterested manner and infinitely fecund in all
that in which it renders itself accessible to itself, indefinitely.

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