Monday, October 13, 2014
Friday, October 10, 2014
The Metaphysics of Aquinas: A Systematic Presentation by Joseph Kockelmans
Kockelmans Joseph. The Metaphysics of Aquinas: A Systematic Presentation Leuven, Bibliotheek van de Faculteit de Godgeleerdheid, 2001.
At last! Professor Kockelman's work is with me again. Penn State's Interlibrary Loan delivered the work from the Bridwell Library of the Southerm Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. It is a book that I used to own, a copy signed with sincere best wishes from the author. The copy, however, was donated to a Cistercian Abbey close to my heart. May it find a good life there and be well studied!
Professor Kockelmans had a bit of a time getting this final work published---it is in my opinion this factor that accounts for Carlos Steel's terse introduction. Ah! the vagaries and styles of scholarship that have changed and changed yet again even in my brief span as a student and instructor of philosophy. At the time Professor Kockelmans sought publication for this work, the current scholarship had gone somewhere that made the effective hermeneutic achievement rendered so precise in Kockelmans' scholarship---seem out of date. Hence, he had disappointing difficulties and the work was rejected by several publishers---including Kluwer. I am aware of this because I had done the legwork on a trip to the Netherlands---even made a personal visit to Kluwer's main office---to ascertain if they would field the work. Despite Kockelmans' amazing track record in publishing, the man said: NIET.
So, it was no simple 'twist of fate' that the work fell under the auspices of the library of the faculty of theology at Louvain--a library with a most august history, and I suppose that with Professor Steel's ironclad oversight the work finally met with a home and fell under publication. An incredible journey for an incredible book!
Quite a few years have fallen away since 2001 and now I can see what I could not see then, save in sketch and portent, namely that the world has become much narrower and darker. Just as the light of the great scholarly work which carried Aristotle and Aquinas through Neo-Thomism and the founding of the Higher Institute of Philosophy by Cardinal Mercier, whose medievalists Mansion, DeWulf, de Raeymaker, Steenberghen carried through the interpretation of Aquinas' metaphysics to me by Jos Decorte, Carlos Steel, Jan Van der Veken and, above all, Professor Kockelmans---just as sure as this was solid learning which seemed impregnable to the corruption of time and what passes as culture, just as swiftly it passed into oblivion. What remains of those days that have passed? This work thank God!
Now let's look at a passage in chapter one on the historical reception of Aristotle's metaphysics in the common era.
"In basic issues Aristotle does not close the inquiry by completely dissolving the 'aporia': usually he lets it go over into a new 'aporia' (Kockelmans, 8)" writes Kockelmans concerning the manner in which Aristotle proceeded in his interrogations (examinations, inquiries)---these often did not lead to clarifications but rather intellectual roadblocks ('aporia': literally, no way through). And hence in an inquiry concerning the meaning of being as being, Kockelmans is telling us that Aristotle did not seek to stop philosophizing with achievement of an answer, but rather entered into new and even greater 'aporiai' ("roadblocks")! An author named Aubenque is quoted to this effect: "Philosophy is for Aristotle not a conquering march, nor is it even, as it would occasionally seem for Plato, a dialectic which completes itself and is then superseded by an intuition: it is a laborious groping effort on the part of the philosophers in search for an arduous truth (Louvain, 1961)."
Perhaps a little commentary would be fruitful here: this 'arduous' truth-calls to mind Nietzsche's mountain climbing, and what one finds particularly decadent in the contemporary scientific milieu is that it is precisely this type of Platonizing effort to incomplete inquiry, where particulars are roughly characterized into abstraction and then a new term (an ugly term, I might add) is introduced---for example, biology (most certainly ugly compared to the actual being of the butterfly, or gurgling stream)----sums up all the particulars under a single intuition and this name is taken as something substantial or real. What's worse is that pedagogically, the student who hears the term 'biology' is under the misguided understanding that the term is merely a term and that the real effort of obtaining (or exercising) truth demands that the thinker proceed one organism at a time---this black bunny, this wire-haired Terrier named Olivia!
At last! Professor Kockelman's work is with me again. Penn State's Interlibrary Loan delivered the work from the Bridwell Library of the Southerm Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. It is a book that I used to own, a copy signed with sincere best wishes from the author. The copy, however, was donated to a Cistercian Abbey close to my heart. May it find a good life there and be well studied!
Professor Kockelmans had a bit of a time getting this final work published---it is in my opinion this factor that accounts for Carlos Steel's terse introduction. Ah! the vagaries and styles of scholarship that have changed and changed yet again even in my brief span as a student and instructor of philosophy. At the time Professor Kockelmans sought publication for this work, the current scholarship had gone somewhere that made the effective hermeneutic achievement rendered so precise in Kockelmans' scholarship---seem out of date. Hence, he had disappointing difficulties and the work was rejected by several publishers---including Kluwer. I am aware of this because I had done the legwork on a trip to the Netherlands---even made a personal visit to Kluwer's main office---to ascertain if they would field the work. Despite Kockelmans' amazing track record in publishing, the man said: NIET.
So, it was no simple 'twist of fate' that the work fell under the auspices of the library of the faculty of theology at Louvain--a library with a most august history, and I suppose that with Professor Steel's ironclad oversight the work finally met with a home and fell under publication. An incredible journey for an incredible book!
Quite a few years have fallen away since 2001 and now I can see what I could not see then, save in sketch and portent, namely that the world has become much narrower and darker. Just as the light of the great scholarly work which carried Aristotle and Aquinas through Neo-Thomism and the founding of the Higher Institute of Philosophy by Cardinal Mercier, whose medievalists Mansion, DeWulf, de Raeymaker, Steenberghen carried through the interpretation of Aquinas' metaphysics to me by Jos Decorte, Carlos Steel, Jan Van der Veken and, above all, Professor Kockelmans---just as sure as this was solid learning which seemed impregnable to the corruption of time and what passes as culture, just as swiftly it passed into oblivion. What remains of those days that have passed? This work thank God!
Now let's look at a passage in chapter one on the historical reception of Aristotle's metaphysics in the common era.
"In basic issues Aristotle does not close the inquiry by completely dissolving the 'aporia': usually he lets it go over into a new 'aporia' (Kockelmans, 8)" writes Kockelmans concerning the manner in which Aristotle proceeded in his interrogations (examinations, inquiries)---these often did not lead to clarifications but rather intellectual roadblocks ('aporia': literally, no way through). And hence in an inquiry concerning the meaning of being as being, Kockelmans is telling us that Aristotle did not seek to stop philosophizing with achievement of an answer, but rather entered into new and even greater 'aporiai' ("roadblocks")! An author named Aubenque is quoted to this effect: "Philosophy is for Aristotle not a conquering march, nor is it even, as it would occasionally seem for Plato, a dialectic which completes itself and is then superseded by an intuition: it is a laborious groping effort on the part of the philosophers in search for an arduous truth (Louvain, 1961)."
Perhaps a little commentary would be fruitful here: this 'arduous' truth-calls to mind Nietzsche's mountain climbing, and what one finds particularly decadent in the contemporary scientific milieu is that it is precisely this type of Platonizing effort to incomplete inquiry, where particulars are roughly characterized into abstraction and then a new term (an ugly term, I might add) is introduced---for example, biology (most certainly ugly compared to the actual being of the butterfly, or gurgling stream)----sums up all the particulars under a single intuition and this name is taken as something substantial or real. What's worse is that pedagogically, the student who hears the term 'biology' is under the misguided understanding that the term is merely a term and that the real effort of obtaining (or exercising) truth demands that the thinker proceed one organism at a time---this black bunny, this wire-haired Terrier named Olivia!
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