Let's back up a bit and go to the place where he introduces being as an idea.
Bottom of page 251.
What is it which the mind is bound to conceive as belonging to all things, and as not belong
to any two things in the same way?
This is the riddle of the Sphinx, and the solution is being.
The classical objection, on the following page, the classical objection to this statement
is that being is such a vague predicate, if you can apply it to everything--call it the
Dash from the Incredibles Principle--if everything is being then nothing is being.
Being is not actually useful for discriminating between different things.
I can subtract it from both sides of the equation, so to speak, and have exactly the same, exactly
the same values and inequalities as before.
Gilson says this is true, but it's not an objection.
Page 252.
“To describe being as the principle of knowledge does *not* mean that all subsequent knowledge
can be analytically deduced from it.”
We're not trying to do the job of Spinoza, here.
“But rather it means that being is the *first* knowledge through which all subsequent knowledge
can be progressively acquired.”
Getting to articulating the beginnings of a system of metaphysics here.
We shouldn't think of being as the kind of concept, which once we grasp it we can deduce
the rest of our knowledge from it.
He calls it the first knowledge, and we acquire all other knowledge through it.
“As soon as it comes in to touch with sensible experience the human intellect elicits the
immediate intuition of being.”
So we can talk about intuitions now.
[erasing chalkboard sounds] He says at the bottom of 252: “The intellect
does not deduce; it intuits.”
So here's the problem with the Cartesian or the rationalist or the Spinozist method: it
tries to deduce things from being and concepts of being. Yes sir?
…Let's take a look at these intuitions.
At the bottom of 252 he says, “the intellect does not deduce; it intuits, and it sees in
the light of intellectual intuition the discursive power of reason and slowly builds up from experience
a determinate knowledge of concrete reality.
Thus in light of the immediate evidence,” that is to say, abstracting from or building
on or from our sense experience, “the intellect sees...” and I think you get here five intuitions,
these key intuitions.
[writing on chalkboard sounds] It sees that something is--top of page 253 in
my edition--or exists.
That what exists exists as that which it is.
[writing on chalkboard sounds] What do I have?
I have an intuition of being… [writing on chalkboard sounds]
I have a principle of identity: that things *are* what they are, they're not other things.
That a thing cannot be and not be at one and the same time.
[writing on chalkboard sounds] We have a principle of non-contradiction.
We see that a thing either is or it is not, and no third supposition is possible.
[writing on chalkboard sounds] That is to say, we recognize a law of the
excluded middle, that existence and non-existence are the only two options.
If a thing is being, it's the being of a thing that is.
The solution to the problem of being is to assign being to the… *becoming* is to assign
the category becoming to being.
And last but not least that being only *comes* from being, which is the very root of the
notion of causality.
[writing on chalkboard sounds] Principle of causality: being only comes from
being, or phrased negatively, you can't get something from nothing.
How do you get something from nothing, in creation ex nihilo?
From God. God Who Is, before anything else is.
Reason does not have to prove any one of these principles, otherwise they would not be principles
but conclusions.
Keep in mind the criticism of Kant, for taking the soul, freedom, and God as principles rather
than conclusions.
Kant just stops after positing those, and showing their necessity from phenomenal experience.
“Patiently weaving the threads of concrete knowledge, reason adds to the intellectual
evidence of being and its properties the science of what is.”
It’s from these things that we get… metaphysics, the science of being.
His suggestion then here is that we have this intellectual intuition, intuition of being,
intuition of causality, intuition of these properties.
You could actually think of mathematical analogues for some of these: A is equal to A, A is not
equal to not-A, A or not-A exclusively.
“The first principle brings with it therefore both certitude that metaphysics is the science
of being as being, and the abstract laws according to which this science has to be constructed.”
What do we have here? We have here, he says, first principles.
The mind should be able to recognize these and assent to them without proof.
This is the fundamental bedrock on which metaphysics is built as a science, the science of being
as being.
The next paragraph: “The twofold character and the intellectual intuition of being, which
is that it is given in any sensible experience and yet transcends all particular experience,
this is both the origin of metaphysics,” because being is everywhere, we can't avoid
experiencing being, “and also the permanent occasion of its failures.”
Because it is everywhere, we're constantly in danger of mistaking it for something else,
mistaking it for the part in which it is presented.
So on the following page, we get what I've noted in the margin as the discussion of “the
mistake of taking the part for the whole.”
I've said before, in some ways this is the characteristic error of modernity, is to take
part of reality and blow it up into the whole of reality, trying to give an account of the
whole, a metaphysical account, that is basically just a generalization of the part.
To do metaphysics correctly, to give a correct account of the whole, you have to get down
to these bedrock principles, and then start from them a science of being as being, it
seems to me is what Gilson is saying here.
Middle of 254: “That which is but a particular determination of being,” or *a* being, “will
be invested with all the universality of being itself.”
The difficulty here is that one takes being and knowledge, *a* being and knowledge of
*a* being, and begins to treat it as though it were capital B being, being itself, or
being as being.
One doesn't go deep enough with one's method and one's first principles so one ends up
using a particular science that's appropriate to some class of beings (lowercase b) and
trying to apply it to the whole of reality, to Being as such, to capital B Being.
That's the mistake, that's the permanent source of its failures.
[Music]