At the bottom of page 254, just before the Fifth Law, is a sentence that I asked you
in the reading guide to read very very closely, because I think there's a lot contained in
this, and I'd like to walk through, (probably erase quickly and then) I'd like to walk through
what I think Gilson is saying in this sentence, because it gets us to the relation between
metaphysics and other areas of human knowledge Gilson writes: “In every order of reality,”
I'm sorry, “*If* every order of reality is defined by its own essence, and every individual
possessed of its own existence…”
Let's map this up here… [writing on chalkboard sounds]
So every part of reality has its own essence.
There’s a nature, there's a… there’s a what-it-means-to-be for each thing.
There’s a way of being a horse, there's a way of being a shoe.
Every part of reality that we can find has some essence to it, some way of being.
And every individual is possessed of its own existence.
[writing on chalkboard sounds] And I think Gilson’s willing to admit both
of these.
Individuals exist as individuals, and each type of thing has a certain essence or kind
or type of thing that it is.
But if both those things are true then, “to encompass the universality of being within
the essence of this or that being is to destroy the very object of metaphysics.”
[writing on chalkboard sounds]
To treat being or Being-Itself (now I'm sounding like Heidegger), to treat being itself or
the universality of being, the whole… as contained in or being conditioned by… the
essence of *a* being (lowercase) of the *part* of the whole, is to destroy metaphysics.
It destroys the very object of metaphysics.
What's the object of metaphysics? It's Being-as-such.
We’ll use a capital B there.
“…is to destroy the very object of metaphysics,” that is, the very thing which metaphysics
is trying to study.
We might compare this to trying to use a tool that is not delicate enough for the job.
Try to use, I don't know, a wrench when I really need to use a very fine pointed caliper.
What do I do? I distort and blunt the thing that I'm trying to pick up.
I crush it, it’s made out of, you know, very thin leaf metal foil.
I need a more precise tool.
This, by the way, when you get to contemporary philosophy, this is exactly the type of critique…,
this is the style of critique that the phenomenologists make of prior attempts to account for human
existence and human psychology, beings.
That the tools, the linguistic and conceptual tools we've tried to use to describe the subjective
reality of human experience have not been subtle enough.
So what you see with Husserl and Heidegger and others is the attempt to craft linguistic
and conceptual tools that can actually describe human experience, subjective experience, without
distorting it with metaphysical categories.
What they say is essentially the same thing: the tools have been distorting the object:
anytime we pick something up, it's crushed and shaped into a certain form.
But we can actually create a new style of doing philosophy that will bracket all those
metaphysical questions and simply take experience as experience.
Just looking forward to phenomenology, that I think is the style of critique they make.
It's similar to this only in the sense that it's saying the same thing about the tool,
the mistake.
I'm trying to use the wrong sort of tool.
For Gilson it's the tools of the particular sciences, if applied to the object of metaphysics,
to being as such, to being as being.
Continuing the sentence: “…but to ascribe to the essence of this or that being the universality
of being itself is to stretch a particular science beyond its natural limits and to make
a caricature of metaphysics.”
[writing on chalkboard sounds] To take *a* being for *being* is to destroy
the object of metaphysics, which is being as such.
To stretch a particular science: biology, psychology, physics, and the like, to try
to account for the whole of reality… “is to stretch the particular science beyond its
natural limits, to make a caricature of metaphysics.”
[writing on chalkboard sounds] That's the key mistake, it seems, that many
of these philosophers are making who have distorted metaphysics, given a false
account of the whole, of the real, by trying to adapt the methods of the particular science.
In fact, Gilson again, one of the fundamental principles in this entire book and all of
his work: using the wrong principles in a science, trying to do one science using the
principles and methods of a different science, is always going to lead you to error.
So he's saying just that about metaphysics now.
There is a coherent object for metaphysics, though it’s difficult to articulate, and
there are adequate methods for doing metaphysics.
Any attempt to try to do, to try to accomplish the tasks of metaphysics, using different
methods and different principles, is going to go awry.
So, the error of taking the part for the whole, I think, is really present on that page, and
especially in that one long passage.
[Music]