Love & Knowledge in Scotus - David Bentley Hart
Youtube video link: Love & Knowledge in Scotus - David Bentley Hart
I've followed Dr Hart’s philosophy of mind in snippets, especially after hearing his next book (after TASBS) would largely address same.
Broadly, he's doing what I insist - an axiological epistemology. It's not that the best Thomisms don't do this, for clearly Lonergan (transcendental), Maritain (existential), Clarke (personalist) and many others do. I've even found certain helpful resonances between Stump & Scotus. Ratzinger as BXVI gave an audience and set forth how Aquinas & Scotus can be reconciled re intellect & will.
The problem with natura pura is, as I've described it, that it devolves into a natura nada of no eternal forms whatsoever.
I've previously put it thus:
A natura nada or unmitigated nihilism would involve a seamless garment of ontic nominalism, subjective idealism, axiological voluntarism, moral relativism & existential fideism, precisely because it lacks eternalities like natures, forms & essences.
We can only ever refer to a putative Natura Nada, not "Pura," as all positive references to "Nature" recognize our intrinsically divine capax Dei, which is only otherwise nuanced as relative not Absolute, particular not Universal, finite not Infinite, except for the person of Christ, Who is all.
All that said, starting mostly with the Alexandrians, Cappadocians, Eastern patristics & Damascene, continuing with an Orthodox leaning toward pneumatic hylomorphism, it's a lot easier to draw a line to - not only Scotus, but - others like Eriugena & Bulgakov. What drew me to all of these thinkers was my pragmatic semiotic realism (Peircean inspired). What they have in common is a LOT of theophanic sign talk (semiotics), using manifestations, revelations, iconography & such. Those idioms, however otherwise different, can map much more felicitously with each other than with ... you know ... certain rationalistic neoScholastics.
One Thomistic key that reigns supreme in & coheres with my approach: His indwelling being is to the intellect as form to matter! Gelpi, Lonergan, Maritain, DBH & others are all saying this using different words.
A vague phenomenology of intentional consciousness doesn't require, in my view, a certain philosophy of mind per some root metaphor. It does require formal causes, both material and immaterial. But the best modern semiotic thinkers all affirm that, both believers & unbelievers.
If our common sense & sensibilities and folk psychology have any truth indicative impetus, whatsoever, we're divinely indwelled imagoes Dei, whose divine indwelling is to our intellects & wills as form to matter! The other alternative devolves into an ultimate nihilism, where we live in a somewhat glorious but mostly tragic ephemeral contingency.
Per a very old poem of mine:
the Spirit woos creation forth•
makes this way south & that way north•
invites each blade of grass to green!•
horizons, boundaries, limits, origins•
perimeters, parameters, centers, margins•
we're given freedom in between!•
thus truth & beauty & goodness grow•
thus lizards leap & roosters crow•
and dawns break with each new day!•
good news is ours to be believed•
love freely given if received•
the Spirit in our heart will stay!•
Theo-Anthropological Rubrics
To be deific is to be an entity in pure act, i.e. to be simply divine!
To be divine is to manifest Goodness via begetting, procession or multiplication, variously exemplifying or signifying it.
To be embodied is to be an entity in act. Angelic & human persons are embodied and in infinite potency to the divine.
The acts of embodied entities have both material (efficiently causal, e.g. the will) and immaterial (formally causal, e.g. the intellect) aspects (integrally intertwined). Both angelic & incorporeal human persons have material & immaterial aspects.
To be corporeal (e.g. a live human person) is to be an embodied entity acting physically.
Corporeal entities can be inanimate or animate.
Animate entities are agential and act, ententionally, in constrained ways relative to specific realities they may lack, absentials.
Rational agents (e.g. human persons) can act both ententionally & intentionally relative to specific realities they may lack, absentials.
Agents refer, therefore, to embodied antinomies or both ententional-absential as well as intentional-absential dynamical aboutnesses.
Our personal aboutnesses refer to constitutive absences.
Paramount, then, in a Bulgakovian sense, “I”s are constituted by “Thous”!
I developed the above rubrics from diverse sources including Terry Deacon’s Incomplete Nature, Eleonore Stump’s & Scotus’ understandings of will & intellect, Bulgakov’s embodied antinomies, various conceptions regarding universal & pneumatic hylomorphisms and my Peircean inspired modal ontology. Taken together, these don’t pretend to provide an explanatory account but do offer us a robustly exploratory heuristic.
Joseph Bracken’s challenge to Deacon remains apposite, also, to my entire rubric:
In Bracken’s article, Is Terrence Deacon’s Metaphysics of Incompleteness Still Incomplete?, American Journal of Theology and Philosophy 38 (2-3):138-151 (2017)
Fr. Bracken probes:
For, as Deacon makes clear in Incomplete Nature, "being alive does not merely consist in being composed in a particular way. It consists in changing in a particular way" (175). An Aristotelian substantial form is basically fixed in its mode of operation. It is thus ill suited to be the governing principle in an evolving life-system in which the mode of operation of the system keeps evolving in the direction of greater order and complexity. But is it enough to claim that the "constitutive absence" of a substantial form to govern its mode of operation suffices to explain from a philosophical perspective how the life-system continues to evolve in an orderly manner? Deacon's appeal to the notion of mutual constraint as the way that the components of a given system dynamically interrelate is simply a description of what happens, not of why it happens.
To Bracken’s point, then, whether one inclines toward a panpsychism or nonreductive physicalism, neither precludes a putative universal divine presence in divinely indwelled shadows, vestiges & imagoes Dei, whose divine indwelling is to our intellects & wills as form to matter!
This post is a follow to
What a brilliant, succinct way of expressing the lynchpin of the debate! One theme of similar genius running through the works of DBH (and I expect more of this in whatever philosophy of mind tome he produces) is his revival of Final Causality as the Omega making all other Alpha causes possible.
I guess in a very prosaic way Steven Covey was saying something similar when he insisted ‘always begin with the End in mind.’ As axiomatic as it is overlooked.
Until an anagogical vision of Christianity replaces what is withering on the vine currently, the future of Christianity is... well... who the hell knows?
Continued blessings on the Minority Report😎