{22} (cont’d)
ii) This vision of the diaphanous, this vision of the transcendental is enormously violent. It is the violence of clarity, the violence of perception and the diaphanous. What kind of violence is it?
At this point —as it will happen many times along the pages of this volume— a certain ambivalence appears. Because the difficulty of going after the diaphanous is partly due to us, since we go after things more than after the diaphanous; but it is also in things themselves inasmuch as they all involve this dimension of diaphaneity. Aristotle already told us that the difficulties of knowledge are partly in things and partly in us, “In the same manner as it is with bats’ eyes with respect to the midday light, so it is with the intellect of our soul with respect to those things which are the most visible in the world (Met a 993b 9-11).” Aristotle did not give to this a decisive importance because he just writes these lines and tells us nothing else; in the end, he was referring to the limitations of human intellection, which is absolutely clear. What is not so clear, if we take a look sixteen centuries later, is what has happened to this same text —and quoted verbatim, as we shall see— at the hands of St. Bonaventure (1221-1274) and all the mystics in general.
St. Bonaventure quotes the same text translated into Latin, “In the same manner as the eye of the bat behaves with respect to light, such is the behavior of the eye of our understanding with respect to what is most manifest in nature”. It would seem, {23} then, that St. Bonaventure is doing nothing but repeating what the Greek had said. Yes, but the phrase does not end there. St. Bonaventure addresses reason, “Because, used to the obscurities of beings and sensible images [it never occurred to Aristotle to call these things phantasms or obscurities], when it sees the light of the very Supreme Being it seems as if nothing is seen, not understanding that this obscurity is the supreme illumination of our mind”1. In other words, here St. Bonaventure is thinking of something else, he is thinking of God and his presence in the world. What he wants to tell us is that the light of God obfuscates us. Nevertheless, obfuscation is not that in which primarily and radically the vision of the diaphanous consists.
As we can see, this is an example of the cases in which the same concepts, placed in another context, acquire a completely different sense. All mystics have referred to this idea that actually man finds himself obfuscated by that which is the supreme light of God, an idea completely alien to the thought of Aristotle, in spite of the repetition of the Aristotelian text. As such, the manifestissimae naturae, té phýsei phanerótata pánton of Aristotle, are translated under the light of the supreme being, under the light of God. However, the violence we are referring to is not obfuscation. Simply because metaphysics is not formally an investigation about God.
It is definitely a violent vision, but why? Because in the first place, it is not something obvious, but something that is in all things. And, in second place, the violence consists precisely in trying to see the clarity, but without leaving the very clarity. It is a kind of retortion upon itself, {24} and here is where the difficulty resides. Metaphysics does not pretend to take us out of things, but to hold us in them to make us see the diaphanous, which is not obvious because it may not be in things, but because it is the most obvious about them. Therefore, metaphysics as something “metá”, as something beyond the obvious in the sense I have just explained, is the knowledge of the diaphanous.
There is nothing more diaphanous than metaphysics. So much so, that the things metaphysics addresses appear to be nothing but platitudes not worth the time spent on them. But let us be careful that this presumed waste of time may not turn out to be the radical way to reconquer the diaphanous in its greater intimacy or at least possess it intellectually in its greater intimacy. Metaphysics is the radical and ultimate vision of the diaphanous.
What is diaphanous might be thought of as something more or less presumed (Sp. sobreentendido) in all things. This is true, but insufficient. It is presumed, not because it may be familiar (Sp. consabido), which is the meaning that presumed often has. That is not the case; it is not presumed in the sense of being familiar. Because here the presumed is a moment of things themselves; they are the ones that actually have this intrinsic moment of diaphaneity that belongs to them2.
Let us take an example. Aristotle thought that metaphysics was going to be about entity (tò ón) (Sp. ente). Let us put aside that the translation may be deficient. Because, in all its generality, ón is a neuter participle of the verb eînai, and simply means “that it is” (Sp. “que es”), not as substantive, entity (Sp. ente), but simply “that it is”. And the “that it is” is understood in many ways, as we shall see further on. Strictly speaking, {25} then, tò ón is not entity, but a simple “that it is”. And in a very natural sense one may think that actually what is diaphanous of things is “that they are”; therefore, that which all things are, namely, “that they are” is what constitutes the supreme difficulty of metaphysics. This term was translated into Latin by the term ens, entity (Sp. ente). A term that does not exist in the standard Latin because the verb “to be”, the verb esse in Latin, does not have a present participle, at least in that form of ens. The verb esse does not have a present participle and if it were to have one, it would have to be essens. And actually, not in the form essens, but indeed in the form sens it appears in the compounds of the verb “to be” and is preserved in Spanish: ausente (ab-sens) [Eng. absent], presente (prae-sens) [Eng. present], etc. With a different linguistic formation, with “o”, it appears in an ancient juridical term of Rome, the term sonticus. For example, “causa sontica” is a reason or an excuse that is valid, i.e., it is true. And actually with this root, -*es it has become the term “truth”, for example in the Indo-Iranian sátya3. The preceding has been, therefore, an example of what can be understood by diaphanous. It is something that is precisely in all things, which if we do not perceive or do not think of this moment whereby things simply “are”, it is because this is so diaphanous that instead we only think about that which things are. It is, let us clarify, nothing but an example and, as we shall see further on, a traitorous example.
And here we have more or less what metaphysics is insofar as “metá”, at least for what it has of transcendental. Now we must indicate what the second part of the term means, we must explain what the “physical” is.
{26} C) Let us put aside historical disquisitions. Not everything that is diaphanous is the object of metaphysics. Why? Simply because metaphysics deals with an “ultimate” diaphaneity. In what does the ultimateness of diaphaneity consist? That is the question. Putting it now in a somewhat dogmatic way, it consists in being beyond things “such as they are”. The “such as they are” is the term that translates —at the right time I will justify not the translation, but the concept— the term “physical”, “things such as they are”. And with respect to such things as they are, the diaphanous, in the previous example, is this “they are”. That “they are” is precisely that which constitutes metaphysics. The ultimateness of things would constitute the ultimateness in the order of being beyond every suchness. Of course, one may ask, if we eliminate from consideration all that things are as such, does anything remain? It seems nothing remains. That is precisely the difficulty with metaphysics, it seems nothing remains precisely because what remains is diaphanous. To make that it may not disappear is the violence in which constitutively metaphysics consists.
Metaphysics is a transcending, that is, to proceed beyond things such as they are towards the diaphanous, without which we could not even begin to talk about things such as they are. What is that ultimate diaphaneity? I have only indicated one example. To answer this question with greater amplitude is precisely one of the subjects we must cover in this work.
That is the aim of the other term fundamental. What do we understand by “fundamental” in metaphysics?
III. Fundamentality of metaphysics
Fundamentality can mean several things. In the first place, that which is most immediate. The fundamental is that which is most important, {27} what is most important to us. But the term “importance” has several versions. One, that for me a certain particular thing may be more or less important; another, that the thing is what imports me, i.e., what takes me with it, the one that carries me. In this last sense, to import does not involve the reference that for me it may be important, but that the very thing is the one that “imports” me, “in-portare”, reaches deeply into me and carries me with it. For this, two conditions must be present.
1) In the first place, that we say what it is in things that carries us with them. This is the moment we have previously called “diaphaneity”. The intellective apprehension of this moment is the principle of metaphysics. Principle does not mean beginning; it also does not mean a first truth or a series of first truths from which others truths derive. Principle is purely and simply the diaphanous as such, insofar as it is that “from” which we have a vision of clarity itself. This moment of from (Gr. óthen) is what since Aristotle has been called the arché, the principle. And in this sense, the principle from is precisely diaphaneity itself insofar as principle of my intellective apprehension of things. It is a principle, which is in the thing itself. It is that principle, which is the principle of all knowing. Thus, for example, an organism is principle of all my anatomical and physiological knowledge. Therefore, in that sense the moment of diaphaneity of things is that from which we understand things intellectively. But this “from” is as problematic as the very diaphaneity. Is this a question of being or something else? Modern philosophy has tended to think that the diaphanous in this sense is truth rather than being. At the right moment we shall discuss this inflexion of thought.
2) In addition, it is also necessary that the diaphanous, which {28} obviously imports us, may be accessible to man, without which there would be no importance; something that involves a certain idea of human intelligence. It is not enough to have the diaphanous in order to have intellection and to have vision. It is necessary to have something elemental —unfortunately it is often forgotten—, we need eyes to see it. Without this there would be no possibility of diaphaneity or intellection of diaphaneity; in other words, we need an idea about intelligence.
However, this might seem to be a duality; that on the one hand there is the idea of things, and on the other the idea of human intelligence. But this is not true, and is not true because between these two dimensions of the subject matter there is an essential unity. This essential unity is precisely the very diaphaneity. Diaphaneity is the unity between intelligence and clarity. Intelligence has a certain sameness with things. This means it is determined and imported by things themselves. Diaphaneity is a moment of things, that which is absolutely obvious, and therefore, that from which intelligence is intelligent and has its proper intellection. Intelligence as something determined from things is in this sense “the same” with things. Not because intelligence and things may be the same; not that, things are indifferent to any intelligence knowing them. However, is the reverse true? Of course not. Intelligence without things could not have its intellective function. Intelligence is the “same” with things inasmuch as intellection is constituted “from“ them. Intelligence has its intellectual function inasmuch as it is being carried from things, i.e., from their diaphaneity. The intrinsic unity between intelligence and things is the very diaphaneity, the very transcendentality. Inasmuch as things not only tolerate, but import and drag towards their transcendentality {29} they precisely constitute the world of intelligence and intellection. That being the case, what intelligence does is to submerge us deeper in things themselves at the moment of their ultimate diaphaneity. And this is what is fundamental in metaphysics.
The fundamental in metaphysics does not consist in being a science that may have some fundaments, that may have some reasons and some principles more or less properly enunciated; without doubt that is something important, something interesting, but always secondary. Regardless of what the structure of the metaphysics may be, it is definitely determined by that which the metaphysical of things is, the diaphanous that imports and drags us with it. The metaphysical is the ultimate diaphaneity of things, of the real. And only dragged by that clarity can the metaphysics be constituted as a science. Let us understand that it can be constituted simply as a possibility, because no one has ever demonstrated that all minds throughout history have had access to metaphysics. I was saying this —now we can see why— referring precisely to Indian thought. Metaphysics only begins where man, knowingly or not knowingly, pretending it or not pretending it (probably pretending it) has thrown himself after the search for the ultimately diaphanous, precisely qua diaphanous.
One may ask, why does man decide to do this? There is no answer to this question. Regardless of the multiple historical speculations attempted about the origin of Greek philosophy, or the ones from the Near East, the Far East, Egypt, Mesopotamia, etc., an essential consideration has always been left out. The fact that the Greek had the “talent for this”. It may appear irrational, but if the Greek had not had the talent {30} to direct themselves precisely towards the diaphanous, insofar as diaphanous, there would have been no metaphysics. It is not the same to have a great deal of rigorous intellectual knowledge than to have, for example, science. As mathematicians the Babylonian practically invented algebra, the algebra more or less abstract, something about which the Greek had no idea. But a Greek simply takes two or three numbers and what he immediately places in motion is the logos, doing something, which is a demonstration, a thing totally alien to Mesopotamian thought. Every epistéme, particularly the metaphysical, is a possibility. The possibility of the diaphanous as such is precisely the very dawn of metaphysics. But we must understand, as we said above, that we should not identify diaphaneity with evidence; as we pointed out, the vision of the diaphanous is always violent.
It is precisely that violence, which the fourth point must explain, the fundamental “problem” of Western metaphysics. What do we understand by problem?
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1 Itinerarium mentis in Deum, Ch. V, no. 4.
2 Zubiri note: “Clarify these concepts”.
3 Cf. X. Zubiri, Naturaleza, Historia, Dios (Nature, History, God), 9th ed., Madrid, Alianza/Fundación X. Zubiri, 1987, pp. 38-39.