Gift and the Unity of Being. Antonio López M.
3.7.
78. Gregory of Nyssa, Commentary on the Song of Songs 1.51, 6.127–29, 12.217–18 (PG 44:780, 885–89, 1021–24).
79. Bulgakov, Lamb of God, 135.
80. A well-known exponent of this claim, which enjoys a great ascendency in theology, is Alfred North Whitehead. See his Process and Reality.
81. Heidegger, OTB, 24 and 2. For his understanding of Sprung (leap), see his Contributions to Philosophy, §117. Heidegger dedicates §§115–67 to defining the meaning of Sprung. In a very different context, Hegel wrote: “Absolute timelessness is distinct from duration; the former is eternity, from which natural time is absent. But in its Concept, time itself is eternal; for time as such—not any particular time, nor Now—is its Concept, and this, like every Concept generally, is eternal, therefore also absolute Presence” (Hegel, Encyclopedia, §258, Zusätze, 36. English translation slightly modified).
82. Aristotle already explained that time is the complex whole that is both inseparable from movement but not identified with it. See Aristotle, Physics 217b29–224a20.
83. Heidegger, OTB, 12. Emphasis added.
84. Ibid.
85. Ibid., 19. For the concept of Ereignis in Heidegger, see Heidegger, Beiträge zur Philosophie, GA 65. See also Heidegger, Pathmarks.
86. Heidegger, OTB, 22.
87. Ibid., 24.
88. Ibid., 13.
89. Ibid., 15. Emphasis added.
90. “The unity of time’s three dimensions consists in the interplay of each toward each. This interplay proves to be the true extending, playing in the very heart of time, the fourth dimension, so to speak—not only so to speak, but in the nature of the matter. True time is four-dimensional. But the dimension which we call the fourth in our count is, in the nature of the matter, the first, that is, the giving that determines all” (ibid., 15).
91. It is possible now to understand why Giussani wrote that “experience is time inasmuch as it identifies itself with a present event” (Giussani, AC, 50).
92. “If God is all sufficient and lacks nothing,” asks Hegel, “why does He disclose Himself in a sheer Other of himself? The divine Idea is just this: to disclose itself, to posit this Other outside itself and to take it back again into itself, in order to be subjectivity and Spirit. . . . God is subjectivity, activity, infinite actuosity in which otherness has only a transient being, remaining implicit within the unity of the Idea, because it is itself this totality of the Idea” (Hegel, Encyclopedia, §247, Zusätze, 14–15).
II. Concrete Singularity
The engagement of the whole of ourselves with the whole of reality, and with the center of both, who is God, calls us to recognize the positivity of all that is. With all its dramatic tensions, originary experience reveals that being itself is good qua given, that it is good to exist with others, and that the task for life is given with our destiny. It also reveals how every concrete singular is thus bound together in a complex, manifold unity in which each is fully itself.1 The preceding chapter’s anthropological reflection now opens up into a path to see in what sense “gift” is able to account for the form of the concrete singular’s unity in its relation to and difference from others and with God, the primordial giver. We begin our ontological exploration by addressing the postmodern attempt to dethrone the category of unity and the primacy of philosophical principles in order to ward off the yoke of totalitarianism (section 1). We will see that this representative exponent of the contemporary, fragmented worldview, as thematized in the postmodern understanding of gift, seems to fall short by not thinking radically enough of the difference between God and the world (sections 2–3). Viewed in light of the radical gift of creation ex nihilo, it is possible to perceive the constitutive gift-ness of concrete singulars with respect to their existence (sections 4–5), their essence (section 6), and their finite perseity (section 7).
1. The Allurement of Anarchy
To characterize a historical epoch without losing its richness and variety is always a difficult enterprise. Moreover, it may be simply presumptuous even to make the attempt when one is still living within the epoch to be described. One aspect of our own culture, however, may be indicated without the risk of platitudes. The technological understanding of reason enshrined in the West (thinking understood in terms of willing) seems to have destined our age to a pervasive fragmentation. This radical disunity appears at every turn: sciences treat wholes as heaps of fragments in order better to use them for the advancement of progress and societal well-being; individual rights, understood increasingly in terms of freedom from coercion, transform persons into individuals who view each other as potential enemies; bureaucracy, intended to serve a well-ordered society, alienates citizens from government while it quantifies and treats them as numeric instances of problems to resolve; families appear as transient congregations of isolated individuals; not infrequently work, family life, and play—now reduced to entertainment—are loosely connected for economic but not organic reasons; sexuality is severed from fecundity and both from spousal union; gender is redefined as a cultural category that is not necessarily connected to somatic features; fleeting and competing feelings define, if only for the moment they last, the identity of the human person.
This panoramic description of disintegrated wholes has found in some postmodern thinkers a theoretical elaboration that expresses the opposite view from originary experience. Jean-François Lyotard, elucidating the meaning of postmodernity, wrote that “we have paid a high enough price for the nostalgia of the whole and the one, for the reconciliation of the concept and the sensible, of the transparent and the communicable experience. . . . The answer is: Let us wage war on totality; let us be witnesses to the unpresentable [which is not another obscure name for God or source]; let us activate the differences and save the honor of the name.”2 It is important to underscore that this account both interprets unity in terms of totalitarianism—which itself is a political reading of unity in terms of power—and proposes to overturn it by means of, once again, power. In their attempt to leap out of the metaphysical discourse, postmodern thinkers present the philosophical reflections that preceded them as the inevitable succession of great narratives. Nevertheless, “the grand narrative,” Lyotard writes, “has lost its credibility, regardless of what mode of unification it uses.”3 To underscore the radicality of the rejection of the grand narrative, it is worth recalling that Jacques Derrida, responding to David Tracy’s adoption of the metaphor of fragments to depict our postmodern spiritual situation, rejected his being labeled a postmodern. Even though Tracy acknowledged that “there are only postmodernities,” Derrida noted that postmodernity is yet another “attempt to periodize the totality of history within a teleological scheme.”4 Derrida clarified further that “what is going on today—in religion, in art, in philosophy, in thinking—is a way of inventing gestures which are not subject to totality or to a loss of totality, to the nostalgia and work of