It's 11:00 pm. The kitchen is reasonably clean, I've baked the cheesecake, a load of wash is in the machine and the girls are sound asleep. I've been working on the metaphysics class, outlining some chapters in Carter's The Elements of Metaphysics. I've gotten through the introductory chapter (where he admits that he puts analysis/epistemology before ontology/metaphysics) and now am almost through with the chapter on substance.
Weird. All this talk about qualities/universals and substances/particulars. Duh. If the method is to analyze language, of course you wind up with Locke's substance as "I know not what" and Russell's bundle theory. If you start with what's in your mind, you can never escape it. I think it's telling that when he writes about Aristotle, he refers to the Categories, but never to the Physics or Metaphysics. I think I'm going to insist they read GKC's St. Thomas chapter 7:
St. Thomas could as truly say, of having seen merely a stick or a stone, what St. Paul said of having seen the rending of the secret heavens, "I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision." For though the stick or the stone is an earthly vision, it is through them that St. Thomas finds his way to heaven; and the point is that he is obedient to the vision; he does not go back on it. Nearly all the other sages who have led or misled mankind do, on one excuse or another, go back on it. They dissolve the stick or the stone in chemical solutions of scepticism; either in the medium of mere time and change; or in the difficulties of classification of unique units; or in the difficulty of recognising variety while admitting unity. The first of these three is called debate about flux or formless transition; the second is the debate about Nominalism and Realism, or the existence of general ideas; the third is called the ancient metaphysical riddle of the One and the Many. But they can all be reduced under a rough image to this same statement about St. Thomas. He is still true to the first truth and refusing the first treason. He will not deny what he has seen, though it be a secondary and diverse reality. He will not take away the numbers he first thought of, though there may be quite a number of them...
The point is Thomas begins not with propositions about things but with the things themselves. Pieper, too, writes about the medieval notion of truth as not just residing in propositions but in things. Omnes ens est verum: all that exists is true. If human minds are created to seek truth then it will be found first in substances, and only secondarily in language or ideas about substances.
But that is a premodern way of looking at things. According to the heirs of Descartes, human minds are all about avoiding error and deception. "Truth" is thus thinned to mean "certainty," and so the collapse of metaphysics is all but guaranteed, because then there is no way to make sense of what GKC says: "If things deceive us, it is by being more real than they seem."
Funny. All through my work tonight I have had the feeling that God is giving me a third chance. It was this very stuff that tripped me up at Notre Dame. I simply didn't have any "template" to understand what I was studying for those metaphysics comps. Now, over a quarter of a century later, I think I'm finally beginning to glimpse how it works. Maybe this is what purgatory is like. We get a chance to keep working on things until we finally "get" them. Or I should rather say we get a chance for the Lord to keep working on us. In that sense, purgatory would be a most gracious doctrine, nothing like the torture we ordinarily think, unless we refuse to "be worked on." Then it would seem difficult to tell the difference between purgatory and hell.
I'm just grateful for the opportunity to try once more to understand it all. Bundles. substrates, bare particulars...words that used to make me shiver, but which now at least are beginning to have some meaning, even if I don't agree with how they function.
