Potentiality, creativity, and relationality: creative power as a "new" transcendental?

Wood, Robert E.

TO SUGGEST AN ADDITION to the transcendental properties of being requires some work--a great deal of it necessarily sketchy and dogmatically presented. But we will try to build everything from the bottom up, from the structures given in experience and what we can infer from them, proximately and remotely. (1) That will constitute the first and densest part of the paper. This part has two subsections that we might designate roughly as "Nature" and "History." Regarding Nature, in a basically Aristotelian analysis with Nietzschian overtones, we will look at the notion of potentiality as that entails creativity and relationality in a hierarchy of powers and beings. At the human level, in a basically Hegelian analysis, we will claim that the notion of being founds History as the accumulation of creative human empowerment through institutionalization. A second major part--which we might call "History of Nature"--will extend the analysis by appealing to the results of scientific investigation that will retain but resituate the previous part. The concluding third part will then suggest an extension of the transcendentals to include creative empowerment through relation.

Nature. Our starting point involves reflection upon potentiality. Potentiality is an inference from actuality, but both notions occupy a very high level of abstraction from what is always already given. The most proximate to us are things and persons presented in the Now of sensed actuality but understood in terms of the powers they exhibit in and through the patterned sequence of that actuality. (2)

We who make these observations stand in our awareness at the pinnacle of a hierarchy of structures functionally copresent in ourselves, but we also stand as the term of a developmental process that reveals the potentialities immanent in the earliest stages of that development. Our reflections rest upon sensory activity that presupposes an organic base, each level of which emerges serially from our earliest stage as a fertilized ovum. The series of stages exhibits two critical thresholds: the passage from organic life to sentient awareness and the passage from sentient awareness to reflective awareness. Observation of the exhibition in sensed actuality of the developing sequence leads to the inference that the earliest stages contained the not-yet-exhibited active potentialities for the actualizations that followed. An exhaustive empirical inventory of the observable actuality of the fertilized ovum yields no insight into the potentialities it contains. Given its relative incomplexity, its presentation of nothing remotely approaching its eventual articulation, it is not too difficult to regard it as nothing but what it actually presents itself to be at that moment for an outside inspection and thus allow it to be dispensed with when it conflicts with our ends. A more thoughtful relation to the fertilized ovum retains an awareness of the inference to the active powers it contains, still only in the earliest phases of the actualization process.

The sequence of actualization occurs in relation to the environment that corresponds to the active and passive powers of the developing human being. In the environment we find the tri-level phases concurrent in us distributed into three kinds of beings outside us: plant life, animal life, and the life of other humans. Plant life together with the corresponding organic level of our own life draws continually upon the elements in the nonliving environment for its own development and sustenance. That gives us four levels: human, animal, plant, and elemental. Whatever we know of the beings occupying these four levels we know through their being actualized in our own sensory field as sensory objects. But their differing modes of behavior allow us to infer differing underlying potentialities systematically linked and to sort out functioning wholes of differing types at each of the levels in correlation to our own functioning wholeness.

From the organic types upward we find a process of what one might call "creative self-transcendence," involving our second notion, creativity. Organic beings set themselves off over against their environment to which they remain essentially tied. They circle back inside themselves and articulate themselves from within: they are the first level of what we call "selves." They are self-contained processes that are self-formative, self-sustaining, self-repairing, and self-reproducing. Their articulation is a matter of increasing self-empowerment that begins with destroying and transforming those aspects of the environment essential to that empowerment, beginning, at the lowest level of life, with the externally available elements. The initial stages of a seed or a fertilized ovum contain the active powers to take in and transform external materials into a progressively more articulated set of organs. The employment of the newly constructed organs allows further powers hitherto latent to be actualized. This self-empowerment involves continual transcendence of the earlier phases. The articulation involved in the growth process culminates in the power of reproduction, the sign of the full maturity of the organism. Here the self-transcendence in progressive self-articulation transcends itself in the production of another of the same type. One might say, with Nietzsche, that living forms exhibit the will to power as self-transcending creativity. (3)

In the case of the animal organism, a much more complicated articulation occurs. In addition to the organs for extracting and processing energy from the environment, new instruments for a completely different function emerge: organs of perception. Embedded also within the causal networks of preliving processes, animals receive the causal impact of various forms of energy upon the organs of perception, which terminates in the selective manifestation of things astonishingly given outside the organism as colored, sounding, smelling, and the like. (4) In the animal case, what emerges at a certain stage of development is a mode of being totally unlike anything lower on the scale: the mode of manifestation or appearance. Empirically linked to the integration and complexification of a nervous system we find the exhibition of a mode of inwardness, an incipient self-presence. Because it occurs, what is outward is, for the first time, shown; it not only is, but it appears as other than the perceiving animal. Incipient self-presence is the condition for the possibility of the appearance of what is other.

However, the appearance of otherness here is in function of the needs of the organism to which it appears. (5) The manifestation of things outside involved in awareness is correlated with the self-experience of the upsurge of desire and serves such desire. Emergent in its own ontogenesis out of the self-enclosing character of organic process, animal self-presence grounds the manifestation of what is outside itself. But with the emergence of the manifestation of the environment goes the emergence of hunger and, in the case of the fully adult organism, of sexual desire as well. Another appears as a necessary complement to itself; and from relation to that other, still others emerge as offspring. Thus central to sensory manifestation is the display and instinctive recognition of appropriate instances of its own kind essential for the work of reproduction and nurturing. As in the case of plant forms, one organism is thus in essential continuity with its line, an instance of a type.

The most elemental mode of sensory manifestation involves the sense of touch which, like the organic body, remains the most fundamental presupposition for all higher functions. Unlike other senses, it has no specifically localized organ but suffuses the body as a functioning whole. I consider this of extreme importance. Touch is the diffuse self-presence of animal being as the essential condition for the possibility of the manifestation of what is other than itself. It involves the first and organically pervasive awareness of awareness that gets articulated in further and organically localized modes of sensation. Prior to that self-presence there is causal impact but no manifestation. (6)

With the addition of other sense powers, manifestation involves another kind of processing of the environment. Through retention of what is received from each of the senses, self-presence involves the integrated operation of the senses to present integrated aspects of integrally functioning wholes outside the perceiver. Because such processive presentation is essentially in function of desire, it is also tied to locomotion and culminates in tactility. (7) It requires retention of the past and anticipation of the future of satisfaction to establish an extensive flowing Now of awareness focused upon the manifest sensory actuality of individual bodily beings in the environment. The presentation of the types of objects correlative to the desire for nourishment and sexuality moves the animal in the direction of the object that it comes to apprehend tactually and in apprehending consumes or mates with or cares for or fights with. The reproductive capacity of such entities involves the peculiar relationality of sexual union. Even in the case of plants, the final self-transcendence in reproducing others like itself involves the active functioning of what is other in the pollination process.

As with plant life, the power of creative self-transcendence in growth and reproduction involves a preservation of earlier phases and a continued enhancement of power until the animal falls into decline, increasingly unable to mate, care for offspring, and fight its enemies. (8) But unlike the plant, animal being in its higher levels involves the capacity to learn and thus a greater empowerment in its command over the environment. It develops habits of response to its manifest environment, habits that make it more flexibly adaptable to the challenges the environment poses and thus more efficient in reaching its ends.

At the distinctively human level, manifestation takes a new turn. Our account takes its point of departure primarily from what is available through seeing. Seeing here is a function of a distinctively human interest: a theoretical interest. But that interest arises later in the process of human development. In the early phase of animal-like development, seeing is a function tied to the growth and sustenance of the organism.

Seeing is a cognitive power, that is, a capacity for manifestation. As such it is correlative to the type of object appropriate to it. (9) Though in each case the power of seeing is an individual aspect of an individual animal being, as a power it is open to all the instances of its generic object: the type of aspect we call color. Correlatively, the color of a thing shows its visibility to all who can see. As seeing is a universal openness to all the seeable, color involves a universal openness to all seers on the part of the colored object. But what is manifest through the actualization of the active power of seeing in relation to the passive power of being seen is always only individual and actual. The powers underpinning the actually manifest are available only to reflective awareness that is able to focus upon the sameness and disregard the differences present in the individual sensed actuality.

Initially, one arrives at the notion of power by a reflective inference from observing the types of sensed actuations expressive of the power. At a most rudimentary level, seeing a red bird, one ignores everything but the particular visual quality, and indeed even ignores the peculiar suchness of the red instance in order to grasp redness as common to all its instances. One moves further up the line to the notion of color as the generic correlate to seeing. Cutting through the peculiarities of instances, intellectual power here grasps in an immediate Wesensschau the horizon of a given organic power in its generic object. One retains the sameness and ignores the differences among the red of the cardinal, the red of the shirt, and the red of the pickup truck to grasp the species redness; and one retains the sameness and ignores the differences among the species red, blue, yellow, black, white, and their combinations to grasp the generic object, color. The latter is indifferent in itself to the color-species. Though the species of color have peculiar images associated with them, the generic color has no such associated image. There is no existent color that is not specific. Berkeley found that a problem. (10) However, that feature of lack of direct imagery involved in the grasp of the notion of color is parallel to the cognitive activity correlative to color, namely, seeing: neither the activity of seeing nor color as its generic object is seeable, but they are intellectually apprehensible. One can also move inferentially at the same time to the seeability of the seen and the power to see in the seer that are likewise not available to vision. Visibility and visual power are universal orientations toward their mutual activation in the peculiar manifest relation between individual instances of the types that can be seen and the types that can see in individual instances of color. Sense reveals the individual and actual instance. It operates in terms of the universality of its own orientation, but it never by itself shows the universality of the power or the correlative universal type of its object. The sensing animal is identical with itself as an organic process and unreflectively present to itself as a functioning whole in its wakeful life. But though the sensory agent is necessarily present to itself in its act, it cannot reflect upon itself. The capacity to grasp the specific and generic universality of the types involved as well as the concrete universality of the powers is a capacity activated, not by individuals as such, but by the modes of universality peculiar to understanding the situation focally apprehended. This power, activated by the universal as such, we have come to call "intellect" as the power of reflective self-presence. (11) Intellect is, we might say, the self-presence of the types as abstract universals and of the powers, abstractly and concretely universal, immanent in nature whose locus of manifestation is sensorially grounded intellect. But that is because it is present to itself as the concrete universal that, through the notion of being, includes all by way of reference within itself. The universals or types it apprehends are themselves potentialities for instantiation in the individuals that exhibit them.

What I want to do at this point is to show a necessary linkage among the levels of the universe outside ourselves correlative to our own powers. Return, then, to the initial and enduring nontheoretical function of seeing. It identifies opportunities and threats to the organic well-being of the seer. As such, it is essentially tied to eating. Now eating is oriented, not, as is seeing, to aspects of environmentally given things but to those kinds of things that are correlative to the appetite. One might think of seeing as in a sense phenomenal and thus as a kind of illusion. Nietzsche said that the senses lie. (12) Seeing presents to us solid and stable objects separated from us by empty space. However, the space is anything but empty and the objects are ultimately processes composed of processes. Now appetite requires not simply the appearance but the reality of objects, those that, as natural prey, can really sustain the organism. Phenomenal food might satisfy the eye, but the appetite requires real food; and the test of its reality is the actual nourishing of the organism that eats it. As a variation on a Feuerbachian theme--itself a variation on what I think is a Stoic theme--we might say, Primum edere deinde philosophari, "First eat, then philosophize." (13) But I might add that eating ought to be a primary object of philosophic reflection that moves us reflectively beyond Kantian phenomenalism because we have already been carried beyond it by eating. (14) Both individual sense powers and the appetitive powers they serve are concrete universal orientations requiring specific kinds of aspects and things in the environment.

Such things, through their active and passive powers, are essentially interrelated hierarchically in the food-chain. Carnivores have their appetitive powers oriented toward herbivores and herbivores toward plants; the powers of plants in turn are oriented toward the kinds of elemental forms that nourish them. All of this has one of the conditions for its possibility in the location of the earth in the solar system, for that location provides the heat-range within which organic forms can grow and makes possible the photosynthesis requisite for plant life near the bottom of the food-chain. These factors can appear only because light is reflected upon bodily surfaces from the same source of heat and photosynthesis.

The first point here is that things are the locus of powers, active and passive, that are systematically integrated, both within living and conscious things and in the systems to which they necessarily belong. One might imagine a separate and self-contained entity, but any real entity is oriented, via its active and passive powers, to the things that sustain and threaten it. Each of those things, in its turn, is oriented toward still others to constitute the ecosystem, the solar system, and, indeed, the cosmic system. (15)

The second point is that all these powers, though individual aspects of individual things, are nonetheless concretely universal orientations requiring the kinds of aspects and things in the environment that are correlative to them. Each power anticipates all the instances of its correlative objects, wherever and whenever they might appear. If there are powers, there are not simply sensed individuals but kinds of correlative objects.

Let me add a third point: the kinds of things that can see and eat are necessarily the results of a reproductive process and are in principle capable of reproducing offspring. They thus necessarily belong to a species, that is, a natural kind. That means also that the specific powers found in the individual are also in the genetic line, so that seeing, for example, is not simply my power, but a type of power found diachronically in one's genetic line. One also finds the same types of functions distributed synchronically in other species and thus in their genetic lines. Not only objects but also their natural powers come in kinds.

The conclusion is that these observations, it seems to me, give the lie to nominalism. Cognitive and appetitive powers are necessarily oriented toward kinds of aspects and things and can only exist because the things that have them necessarily belong to a species. The relation between intelligible and sensible, universals and particulars, functions in any natural power and not simply in intellectual beings. Powers are relations to the whole of space and time as the possible locus of their activation under the specific conditions of their operation. Not only are cognitive powers "in a way all things," but each power of any being is in a way all those things correlative to it that can act upon it and upon which it can act. That way is the way of a priori reference. The problem of induction is solved at the level of natural cognitive and appetitive powers, for the generic features of their objects are always verified and not subjected to falsifiability as the verifiers themselves are oriented toward types of aspects and things and necessarily come in biological kinds. (16) This cuts through the problem of universals by showing what the fundamentum in re is: native power. Intellect is the capacity to recognize types of powers as powers in their active and passive types and their correlative types of objects.

These observations give grounds for Plato's claim in the Sophist that the definition of being is the dynamis of acting and being acted upon. (17) To be anything is to be the locus of powers, active and passive, each systematically interrelated with everything else within its system. (18) This raises us to the level of intellectual apprehension that corresponds to the native object of intellect: being as such. And this brings us to the second subsection (the secunda primae): human history.

History. Let us consider more closely the notion of being. (19) It is, I would claim, what grounds the distinctively human as the being that creates history. In our own ontogenesis, the notion of being emerges at a certain stage to turn the monopolar animal, fixated on the individuals presented sensorially as objects of desire, into a bipolar human being distinguished by its orientation toward the Whole. (20) ("Bipolarity" is obviously intended here in the nondysfunctional sense, though I would say that the emptiness of the notion of being blows the lid off the reliability of animal appetite and makes the human being the potentially chaotic animal. (21)) Though initially empty, the notion of being includes everything by way of reference because outside being there is nothing. The initial emptiness of the notion makes us the locus of the question of being as the question about the Whole: the whole of all beings and the wholeness of each being within that Whole. (22) "what's it all about? How do we fit in the whole scheme of things? what is the whole scheme of things?" These are the perennial questions built into human existence. But what we know of the whole has to be constructed through sensation, abstraction, reflection, and inference along the lines explored above. Things rise up to meet us in the actuated sensory field, but they fall back into the mystery of their own being that draws on inquiry.

The notion of being pries us loose from the environmentally given, allows us to consider it apart from our needs, and condemns us to choose among the possibilities revealed by what we come to understand of it and of ourselves. The understandings and choices sediment into habits. Passed on to others, they constitute the institutions in which succeeding generations are raised. Together they form a cultural world, a predetermined and interlinked set of ways of thinking, acting, and feeling that comprises the accumulated power of the culture. Institutions are related in various forms of complementarity and tension, both internally and externally, that propel a culture at any given time beyond itself. Into such a complex each of us is thrown.

Having the bipolar structure of organically grounded empty reference to the Whole, an individual human being comes into possession of itself through the mediations of others. Reference to the Whole places each individual at a distance from its own embodiment and, indeed, from all finitude, and condemns it to choose. What it has to choose from is determined by three antecedent structures. First is its genetic endowment that sets its basic possibilities. Second is the cultural stamp that has already identified possibilities immanent in the human gene pool, focused them, and honed them through the creation of institutions. Those who raise the individual mediate the culture within their own limited understanding. Through the emergence of the reflective I, the individual's own limited understanding and consequent choices give further focus. Any adult human has already made his own choices from the possibilities, genetic and cultural, in the limited way he has become aware of them. In this way the human individual develops its own set of habits as a third level of determinants specifying its current concrete possibilities. These three levels--genetic, cultural, and personal-historical--constitute what we might call the Me, that is, what I can objectify about myself as my real determinants setting the scope of my real possibilities at any given moment in my own history. They sediment into the heart as the locus of spontaneous tendencies to behave correlated with the appearance of significant presences. But by reason of its reference to the Whole of being, the I that objectifies and chooses stands at an infinite distance from the determinate Me. (23) Reference to the Whole establishes a desire beneath all particular desires, a passion for the Whole. (24) On its basis I have to ask myself, "Where is my heart? Is it where it ought to be? Where ought it to be?" On that basis, too, the individual becomes not simply the recipient of the culture; it can also be its cutting edge by its ability to create new possibilities of understanding and action that can be added to the cultural repertoire. What is crucial is that such understandings and skills are accumulated by passing them on to others. It is by reason of such systematic interrelations that individuals are empowered. As individuals take their places within these systematically functioning cross-generational wholes, both the individuals and the wholes are further empowered.

To concretize this a bit, at this point I want to look briefly at two particular institutions, one encompassing and one more specific, namely, language and music.

Basic to any cultural accumulation is the institution of language. Without it intellectual power would largely lie fallow. Together with the organic requirements, language constitutes the enduring foundation for any human community. It binds individuals together in a given geographical region and across generations as it separates its speakers from other linguistically united groups. A language as the ability to speak about anything and everything is founded on the notion of being. (25) It is this notion that makes possible the interrelation of individuals and universals, tagged and retained through language, that fills in the initially empty reference to the Whole. Referred to the Whole via the notion of being, we are also referred to the whole of space and time as the basis for grasping types as indefinitely repeatable wherever in space and whenever in time they might be encountered. The "light of Being" thus makes abstraction itself possible. (26) But what is grasped is retained in the conventions of a given language.

To those who enter into a language it is a given, but from the beginning it had to be brought into being by human inventiveness, grasping the possibility of correlating conventional sound patterns with meanings and the things to which the meanings refer. Language functions on the basis of the recognition of the indefinite repeatability of the same sound patterns--even in the different modulations of their being sounded out in an individual speaker--in order to hold for oneself and others the recognition of repeatable types found in experience or brought to it by invention. The reduction of language to a mechanical habit grounding its flexible employment is the most basic human empowerment. (27) It opens the communal space for all other human achievements. (28) It allows us to pass on the results of our observations, inferences, and skills to future generations. The invention of writing expands the scope of the audience from the face-to-face relation of oral transmission, secures the independence of the reader from the writer, and ratchets up the power of the culture though providing immediate total retrieval of the externally, spatially, and therefore statically recorded past that, in itself, disappears as it is generated.

Let us look at the second example of creative empowerment through the relationality involved in cultural institutionalization: let us consider music. (29) Music presupposes first of all the discovery of systematic harmonic relations of sound from out of the cacophony of sound generated by the environment, natural and human. Based upon the creation of the sound system, musical genius invents new genres of harmonic combination or brings existent forms to perfection. Musical pieces stand in a history of institutions formed by the development of various techniques: the technology of instrument construction, compositional technique, and the techniques of instrumental performance. Each involves the developed capacity to identify recurrent structures, that is, to abstract the universal. It also involves initially the grasp of recurrent possibilities of combination not yet envisioned by others. It is such interrelation that allows those talents, otherwise only latent in the human gene pool, to be identified, focused, and honed into excellent performance. How many potential classical pianists were there among the Neanderthals? Proximately none, but remotely--in terms of genetically based possibilities--probably as many as there are now. It is the development of institutions generally that evokes competencies among those who have the suitable genetic endowments. Institutions, developed over very long periods of time, bring the individuals inducted into them to a distinctively more complex level of freedom to unlock otherwise fallow talents and to perform at a significantly higher level. They create the conditions for the ability to create further. (30)

History is the process of a cumulative unlocking not only of the hidden potentialities of nature outside us but especially of those human potentialities of operation hitherto undiscovered. In working over nature we discover what we could not discover by mere description, but at the same time we develop the correlative skills to work it over and new ways of employing both the knowledge and the skills. (31) In our working for the community, knowledge of the powers of nature and of skills in discovering and employing them lead over time to the increasing self-empowerment of the human community as such.

Let me add that the ability to stand back from the environment sensorially given in function of need allows one not only to know and use, but also to identify appreciatively with any given other. It allows one to exhibit the kind of love that creatively empowers the other as well as oneself. Indeed, self-empowerment in all the legitimate ways in which that can happen is a way of being able to empower others ever more effectively.

II

At this point I want to extend the field of application of the notion of creative empowerment through relational systems until we arrive at their transcendental extension. We will attempt to do so by moving from a view based on the enduring givens of our experience to one based upon extensive, specialized, empirical investigation.

Patient empirical inquiry accumulated over generations lifted the scientific community beyond the limitation of an Aristotelian cosmos of eternally repeated forms--even the forms of history (32)--and pointed to a series of species appearing sequentially over time, an evolving rather than a static set of forms, systems on the move rather than eternally repetitive systems. Empedocles had inferred as much in a very general way from examining the geological strata in the quarries at Syracuse that showed less complex fossils at the lowest levels and more complex forms at the higher levels. He postulated mutations through random combinations. (33) Aristotle dismissed all this with the observation that cows produced cows produced cows, and tomatoes produced tomatoes produced tomatoes, leaping from this observation to et sic ad infinitum. He also noted that deviations from normality in each species died out rather than persisted as new species. (34)

I take it that the sequence of forms is well established by the fossil record. The problem is explanation of that sequence as the serial appearance of the three distinctively different kinds of things--living things, awareness, and reflective awareness--operating within and drawing upon the environment of nonliving things that preceded them. The Aristotelian view is based upon the irreducibility of the properties belonging to each of the levels. Each level beyond the elemental requires soul, and each requires a different kind of soul than the others, though the higher presuppose and subsume the lower. (35) "Mere bodies" remain as the elemental basis from which organic bodies are produced by the offspring of adult organisms and as the residue of living forms. (36)

Now, given the three critical thresholds, it is not unintelligent to infer first of all, as did Aristotle, that each is independently immanent in the universe--until the accumulation of data through modern scientific investigation showed the chronological sequence in their appearance in the known universe. What emerged was the awareness of the limited temporality of at least the phase of the universe since the Big Bang and the factual temporal sequence of forms from incomplex to complex passing the critical thresholds. But it is also not unintelligent to infer that, if we grant the temporal succession of threshold types, some "higher power" is needed to introduce each newly appearing level--self-replicating systems, awareness, and reflective intelligence--in an evolving universe. (37) But we would here suggest that the same argument that projects all the powers of the fully adult human back into the fertilized ovum could also be used to do the same for the earliest stages of the universe--in fact, I see nothing to preclude that necessarily. What is required is to preserve attention to the differences at each level, which is why we spent some time in the first part of this paper showing the essential differences. But we can never claim to know enough about the lower to preclude the possibility of the higher emerging out of it. Like the case of the fertilized ovum, no empirical inspection of the earliest stratum in scientific inquiry yields the potentialities it contains. One would not have expected from an empirically based model of the atom that it contained the possibility of combination that would release hitherto unheard-of power in atomic fission or fusion. This involved the transformation of the notion of matter composed of bits of extension moved from without to a notion that involves the interchangeability of mass and energy. An inference, parallel to that from reflective adult to the active powers of the fertilized ovum, would transform the notion of the elements or "mere matter" to the locus of creative powers that, under specific combinations, would exhibit the levels that have factually succeeded one another. What is crucial to observe, however, is that the potentialities would not lie in isolated individual particles, as if a subatomic particle, an atom, or a stone could be aware. The power would lie in their systematic relations. Joining with others unlocks the potentialities for form-bestowal that would otherwise remain fallow in the initial system. Here we would have, at the lowest level of the universe, the creative empowerment through relationality that we have observed at the human level. (38)

Living forms gathering power to transcend themselves in growth and reproduction would themselves have come into being through the self-transcendence of elements initially functioning outside the combinations that unlocked the powers of the system. This is the first stage of the form-giving powers at the base of the system. The repetition of the same in each species would transcend itself in the progressive emergence of more complex forms, increasingly more integrated until they emerge as beings self-present through being in touch with their own functional totality. Here their own incipient serf-presence makes possible a self-transcendence through the manifestation of what is other than themselves. Finally, the highest modality of serf-transcendence occurs through reflective awareness set at an infinite distance from its determinate self by being referred to the Whole that it presupposes. This makes the human the locus of manifestation of the underlying powers of the empirically given universe. Human awareness is the manifestation of the evolutionary cosmos itself, but at the same time also the self-present center of creative empowerment. Such manifestation and creativity are only possible through the development of centuries-long institutions of inquiry and practice. (39)

One of the consequences of such a view is the defeat of the notion that the embodied human spirit lives in an alien place. Whatever belongs to embodiment is not temporary, but belongs to the essence of humanness. Its relation to the physical environment is a relation to its home rather than its prison. Nietzsche's "fidelity to the earth" expresses an essential imperative of the human condition.

As has natural science generally, evolutionary theory has been dogged by a basic but utterly unnecessary materialism. Our initial notion of matter is what appears to an empirical inspection: extended, moving, colored, sounding, actual individuals, presented as contained within their own boundaries and in seamless observable connection with their antecedents and consequents. (40) What we come to know about the most elemental level was modeled upon such objectivity. Awareness came to be considered some intracerebral occurrence that was either identical with or epiphenomenal to brain processes. Evolution was a matter of more and more complex externally observable mechanisms. But such a view gives a distorted framework for understanding the whole. It exhibits what I call the "empiriomorphic fallacy," considering all things in the form of the sensorially given. (41)

There is another way of looking at nature, equally compatible with the externally observed phenomena, but especially attentive to the inner conditions for observation and inference that we have presented in our first section. Over against the dominant empiriomorphism, this view reestablishes anthropomorphism on a more sophisticated basis. One of the first to advance it was Schelling, who viewed matter as "frozen mind." (42) He was foreshadowed by Leibniz's idea that "perception and appetition" constituted the inward nature of all things, (43) and followed by twentieth-century thinkers like Alfred North Whitehead (44) and theological popularizers like Teilhard de Chardin. (45) The position is known as "emergent evolutionism," according to which the most basic explanation is from higher to lower, that is, from the later, more complex, to the earlier and simpler forms. It is actually Aristotelian in form: the simpler and earlier are potentially what the later, more complex forms are actually. Since the later possess the inwardness of perception and desire and, more deeply, of thought and choice, the earlier must possess the same potentially--though only remotely. An immensely long and complex intervening set of stages has to be traversed, statistically well-nigh impossible under the assumption of chance and the denial of teleology. (46)

In such a view, "matter," not as "stuff" but as a principle, would still remain a principle of passive potency with all the work assignable to such a principle (change, individuation, spatiotemporal location, passivity, exteriority, asunderness, self-opaqueness). (47) But matter in the sense of the elements would have the active potencies inferable from what emerges out of them. Such "matter" is neither a region absolutely other than mind nor the ultimate explanation of mind; it is mind in an early phase of its development, mind still immersed in the principle of exteriority, asunderness, and darkness. Though matter in observed exteriority furnishes the factual conditions for the emergence of the higher levels, the explanation for the lower lies teleologically in the higher as act explains potency.

This leads us to our concluding section.

III

Briefly to recapitulate our path: A reading of the hierarchy of experienced beings from the living upward yields the notion of the active power of creative self-transcendence manifest to the kind of being that can grasp the essential structure of that hierarchy and creatively empower itself to develop in history through the relational systems it creates. Natural scientific inquiry suggested an extension of the notion of creative empowerment through relationality down below the threshold of organic process to the level of the elemental. This now puts us in a position to suggest that relational creative empowerment is a transcendental property. Here we will have to be even more sketchy than we have been thus far.

The traditional notion of the transcendentals goes back to the ancient Greeks. In Plato we find all things participating in goodness, unity, and beauty, which function together as ground of truth and as term of the human ascent. (48) In Aquinas's list in De Veritate we find an expansion of the list to include thinghood (res) and otherness (aliquid) as modes of articulating that formality under which the mind operates, namely the notion of being as esse habens. (49) Each transcendental property is coterminous with being. Each is realized according to the degree to which a being participates in being. Each thing that is, insofar as it is, is thingly, unitary, other, intelligible, good, and-some have added--internally beautiful. "Insofar as it is" means insofar as it fulfills its essence and stands at a higher or lower level of types in the hierarchy of being determined by degrees of "remotion from matter." Each higher level is less restricted in its realization of being by what it is essentially in itself. But the hierarchy in which things operate was conceived of as essentially static. As Aristotle saw it, the cosmos involves the eternal repetition of the same types imitating the eternally same Unmoved Mover, who functioned as exemplar for all the rest. (50) Elsewhere Aquinas points out that not only notions like being and unity but also notions like act and potency extend beyond the sensorially given things from which we take our point of departure; they apply to all things. (51) I underscore act and potency here, where potency has to mean active potency. We might then suggest that the esse which each ens habet is itself creative act.

The act of existence is not only a standing outside of nothing. Each thing that is ex-sists as standing outside of its earlier phases by contributing to the self-transcendence involved in the universe we inhabit. Material elements transcend themselves by joining to unlock the power of self-replication. Self-replication leads to progressively higher forms of self-development. The hierarchy of being involves the mutual creative empowerment of individuals and relational systems. One might suggest also that relationality as the basis for creative self-transcendence mirrors an all-powerful creative divinity whose own being is relational.

If we follow the direction of the notion of being and are faced with any putative limit--like the Big Bang and the expanding universe that some cosmologists suggest is the locus of all meaningful questioning (52)--we can always ask what lies beyond the limit. This direction of the excess of the question beyond any limit may be linked to questioning the ground of finitude itself. (53) If the horizon of the questioning of beings is unlimited, how can being be limited in the things that are? It would seem then that the only adequate explanation of finitude would be absolute infinitude. This would transcend not only the finitude of an Aristotelian divinity but also its lack of awareness of, concern for, or effective power over things beneath it in the hierarchy. Absolute infinity is absolute creative power giving being to all finitude. But we might also suggest that the existence of what is other than divine infinity requires a principle of otherness within God that precontains all the ways in which what is other than God can be. (54) The notion of persons as grounded in and contributing to ongoing community suggests inner personal relatedness within God Himself. (55) God is the One and the Other linked by Love. Creation is the overflow of divine power by reason of the generosity of divine love through the Otherness within God.

If the unity, goodness, intelligibility, beauty, and otherness of creatures are their ways of imitating God, might one not say the same for creative power? God's power is omnipotence by which, as community of Persons, He is Creator of heaven and earth. Creatures imitate Him by transcending themselves, gathering power to create beyond where they are at any given moment, and, in the human case, passing on the results of their creativity to subsequent generations. In the static view of the hierarchy, the elements do not have the power of creative self-transcendence. In an emergent evolutionist view, they do. Following Whitehead, we could then claim that everything is in the grip of a primordial creativity. (56)

This view resituates the observations made in our first part and involves a transformation of our understanding of the nature of theoria and its relation to creative activity. Empirical inquiry linked to active manipulation through creative technology uncovers hidden properties not available to simple contemplation. But inquiry is also linked to creative theorizing, producing the successive paradigms that expand our theoretical and practical hold on things. The primacy of theoria in Aristotle was linked to a notion of what we might call a narcissistic divinity who cared not for and did nothing to those beneath it. In Plotinus it involves the ultimate aspiration to be "alone with the Alone." (57) In a view in which God is the power of being as a community of love, creativity under the aegis of love carries the community forward as imitatio dei. It is a way of being together with the Together, imitating the togetherness of the divine Trinity. Love transcends the self into the community that continues on after the death of the individual. It is ever creative of fresh ways of showing itself in all the small things in life as well as in the greater. (58)

But the community of love is not only the human community: it is that community enriched by the humans' appreciative relation to all that stands along the hierarchy leading up to it. Emergentism has as a significant consequent that the respect due to human being has to be extended downward to our antecedents, even to the bottom of the chain of being. (59) Respect for the integrity of natural things follows.

But this also entails a set of priorities, with the lower yielding to the higher as instrumental, exhibited quite clearly in the need to eat. The resultant is a respectful instrumentalism, not wanton imposition. Such appreciation would not only let nature be, it would also gather it up into formative activity. (60) This can occur not only in art but also in technology itself when the aesthetic properties learned from nature are brought over into technological transformations. (61) Further, a form of government that respects the free self-disposition of every human being unleashes the creative potential of the whole community, giving as free reign as possible to creative enterprise in all its forms. (62)

A merely theoretical approach to things--such as the one we have given--is not necessarily a superior approach. In a universe of emergent creativity, active service through creative empowerment across the height and breadth of human activities stands at least at as high a level. "Being alone with the Alone" might even be inferior to being together with the Together, assimilating the past to create a future of greater human empowerment as imitatio dei. Such a view would be able to respond to Nietzsche's charges: it would be "faithful to the earth" (63) and to a divinity who, having created the crocodile as well as the deer, saw it all as good.

University of Dallas

Correspondence to: Department of Philosophy, University of Dallas, 1845 E. Northgate Drive, Irving, TX 75062.

(1) This paper is a tribute to Kenneth Schmitz on the occasion of the celebration of his eightieth birthday. The dispositions and directions it exhibits have their roots in his courses in the history of modern and recent thought. His treatment of the history of thought showed his students a model of how to enter sympathetically into the most diverse points of view. His introduction to Husserl showed how to get back, from mere historical exposition, to "the things themselves." The combination of the two dispositions showed us how to study each thinker sympathetically by focusing through him on the things themselves. This paper has a special relation to Prof. Schmitz's course on nineteenth-century thought: it began as an attempt to appropriate Nietzsche and went on to develop in an Hegelian direction, but it alms directly at "the things themselves."

(2) The following phenomenological descriptions follow the path of Aristotle in his On the Soul from act to object to power and essence. However, the description does not depend upon Aristotle; it illustrates Heidegger's claim that phenomenology is a return to the practice of Plato and Aristotle (Prolegomena to a History of the Concept of Time, trans. Theodore Kisiel [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992], 136). I have tried to illustrate this in Plato and Aristotle in "Phenomenology and the Perennial Task of Philosophy: A Study of Plato and Aristotle," Existentia 12, no. 3-4 (2002): 252-63.

(3) Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1967) II, #12, p. 79.

(4) I underscore "astonishingly" here as well as "outside the organism" because an empirical description traces the route of light transmission, absorption by and reflection from bodily surfaces, refraction through the lenses inside the eyeballs, projection of images on the rods and cones of the retina, and electrical stimulation of the optic nerve that carries the stimulus to the visual cortex in the back of the brain. All this naturally leads one to conclude that what I see are images in the back of my brain produced by the process just described. But of course if this were the case, I could not exhibit the visual evidence for the description just given of events outside my organic inside. Vision itself is not part of visual evidence. I call the conclusion above "natural" because it spontaneously follows from taking empirical objectivity as the exclusive index of reality--an instance of the "empiriomorphic fallacy" to which I will return later. Democritus had a less refined version of the above: seeing for him was having an image in his head. Aristotle noted that Democritus would then have to explain why mirrors do not see (On Sensing and the Sensory Object 6.445b10).

(5) Aristotle, parallel to the inseparability of act and object, and act and power, maintains the inseparability of sense and appetite (On the Soul 3.7.431a13).

(6) This pushes some otherwise disjunct observations of Aristotle in On the Soul: that touch is the basic sense (2.3.415a4, 3.12.434b24); that the specialized senses are rooted in a "common sense" that involves "awareness of awareness" (3.2.425b12); and that Democritus, who held seeing as identical with mirroring, had no explanation of why mirrors do not see, even though they hold an image. See my "On Touch: A Phenomenological Inquiry," Southwestern Philosophy Review, 17, no. 1 (January 2000): 19-26. For an application of reflection along these lines to the question of the plurality of the arts, see Jean-Luc Nancy, The Muses, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 16-24.

(7) This is why Aristotle's order of treatment On the Soul moves from the general notion of psyche (2.1.412a and following) through the hierarchy of capacities--from nutritive (2.4.415b28 and following), to sensient (2.5.416b33 and following), to rational (3.4.429a10 and following)--only to "descend" to locomotion (3.9.432a15) and culminate in touch (3.12.434a22 and following).

(8) Will to Power, #715.

(9) I develop this notion in "Individuals, Universals, and Capacity," The Review of Metaphysics 54, no. 3 (March 2001): 507-28. It is an insight found in Hegel's Philosophy of Mind (hereafter, "HPM"), trans. William Wallace and A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), #401.

(10) George Berkeley, The Principles of Human Knowledge, "Introduction," #8.

(11) Compare Aristotle: "The soul is, in a way, all things"--"all things sensible by sense, all things intelligible by intellect" (On the Soul 3.8.431b22).

(12) Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), #117, p. 73.

(13) Compare Ludwig Feuerbach, Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, trans. Manfred Vogel (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1986), #52-3.

(14) The Kantian distinction of noumena and phenomena is significant, involving as it does the setting off of a discursive and receptive intellect from a hypothetically intuitive and creative one. It is the severance of the two that I think reflection upon eating overcomes. Compare Leon Kass, The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of Our Nature (New York: Free Press, 1994).

(15) The "enemy" here is Hume's notion of sensations as "loose and separate" in Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Eric Steinberg (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1977), 49.

(16) Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery (New York: Basic Books, 1959), 40-2.

(17) Sophist 247e.

(18) This is a point Leibniz made with his notion of compossibility. Each thing that is must be compossible with the system within which it exists. The difference here is that Leibniz was not simply talking about compossibility of powers as we are but with compossibility of every concrete act. Compare Monadology, #56 and 57.

(19) I am much indebted to the analysis of the notion of being in Bernard Lonergan's Insight: A Study of Human Understanding (New York: Harper and Row, 1978), 348-74.

(20) Compare my Placing Aesthetics (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1999), chap. 1, for a further development of the structure of the field of experience.

(21) For Nietzsche man is the chaotic animal, and the task of life involves the practice of natural asceticism to compel the chaos to take on form. See Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vantage, 1967), #868, #915.

(22) Compare Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 27.

(23) HPM, #413.

(24) See my forthcoming "The Heart in/of Augustine's Confession," to appear in the proceedings of the Baylor Symposium on the Confessions.

(25) Compare Jacques Derrida against Benveniste in "The Supplement of the Copula: Philosophy Before Linguistics," Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 175-206.

(26) This is a direction followed by Karl Rahner in Spirit in the World, trans. William V. Dych (New York: Herder and Herder, 1968), 117 and following.

(27) HPM, #461-3.

(28) Compare Heidegger, Poetry, Language, and Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 73-4.

(29) I have tried to limn the eidetic space for music along with several other artforms in a work nearing completion, Artforms: A Phenomenological Introduction. Compare also my forthcoming introduction to Gabriel Marcel, Music and Philosophy (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2005).

(30) Nietzsche claimed that all significant art rests upon a host of conventions, upon discipline established over centuries that enables a given artist to bring a given genre to perfection. See Will to Power, #809.

(31) This insight lies at the center of Hegel's discussion of the master-slave relation in his Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 111-18. It is the center of Alexandre Kojeve's brilliantly one-sided interpretation of Hegel's work, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, ed. Allan Bloom, trans. James H. Nichols (New York: Basic Books, 1969).

(32) In his Politics (7.10.1329b25) Aristotle said that the arts and sciences are lost and found again and that philosophy rises from and declines again into mythology as the polis supporting the arts and sciences develops and declines again and again for all eternity. Even the fine arts have their "natural form," as it appears for tragedy in Sophocles (Poetics 4.1229a10).

(33) G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, The Presocratic Philosophers (London: Cambridge University Press, 1966), #442-7, 336-40.

(34) Physics 2.8.

(35) On the Soul 2.3.415a; 3.7.431a15.

(36) Robert Sokolowski notes that the notion of organic matter as residue of living forms reestablishes Aristotle's distinction between earthly and heavenly matter on a new basis. See "Modern Science and Material and Formal Causality," in Recovery of Form, Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, ed. Therese Druart (1995): 61.

(37) In the Catholic tradition, Pius XII in Humani generis allowed that forms up to the level of the rational could emerge evolutionarily, but he claimed that the emergence of the distinctively human soul required "special creation" by God.

(38) For the scientific basis for such a view see Errol Harris, The Foundations of Metaphysics in Science (New York: University Press of America, 1983), summarized in Cosmos and Anthropos (New York: Humanities Press, 1991).

(39) Minus the evolutionary view for which he thought evidence during his time was still insufficient, the view is basically that of Hegel in the Encyclopaedia Philosophy of Spirit.

(40) See my "Individuals, Universals, and Capacity" for a further discussion of this idea.

(41) I introduced this expression in my A Path into Metaphysics: Phenomenological, Hermeneutical, and Dialogical Studies (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 36; but it was never picked up.

(42) F. W. J. Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature, trans. Errol E. Harris and Peter Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 181.

(43) Monadology, #14-15.

(44) Science and the Modern World (New York: Free Press, 1967), 39-55, 100 and following.

(45) Phenomenon of Man, trans. Bernard Wall (New York: Harper, 1959).

(46) Compare Lonergan, Insight, 259-61, on the idea that the universe of our experience exhibits the general form of "emergent probability" that presents to us "systems on the move" rather than a universe of statically repeated forms.

(47) This is an agglomeration of insights in Aristotle, Aquinas, Schopenhauer, and Hegel. On Aristotle see my Path into Metaphysics, 1656; on Aquinas, ibid., 180; on Schopenhauer see my Placing Aesthetics, 188; on Hegel, HPM, #381.

(48) Republic 508c and following, and Symposium 210e and following.

(49) On Truth, I, 1.

(50) Metaphysics 12.5.1071 and following, and On the Soul 2.4.415b.

(51) Summa theologiae I, q. 84, ad 1.

(52) Stephen Hawkings in a television interview.

(53) This direction is taken by Karl Rahner, Spirit in the World, 57 and following and 179 and following.

(54) Von Balthasar makes this argument.

(55) This is related to the notion of imago dei advanced by Richard of St. Victor, following Genesis 1:27, "In his image he made him, male and female he made him."

(56) Process and Reality, pt. 1, chap. 1, sec. 1.

(57) Enneads 5.1.6; 6.7.34; 6.9.11.

(58) See Marcel's notion of "creative fidelity" in his book by the same title, Creative Fidelity, trans. Robert Rosthal (New York: Noonday Press, 1964).

(59) For a splendidly argued development of this theme, see Holmes Ralston, III, Environmental Ethics: Duties to and Values in the Natural World (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988).

(60) Compare Heidegger, Being and Time, 117.

(61) See Frank Lloyd Wright, The Future of Architecture (New York: Mentor, 1963), 43, and Le Corbusier, Towards a New Architecture, trans. Frederick Etchells (New York: Praeger, 1960), 8 and 23.

(62) See Michael Novak, The Spirit of Capitalism (Lanham: Madison Books, 1982). This remarkable book, combined with my youngest sons' development of a landscape design and installation company, removed the blinders from my eyes regarding business and engineering. In my own seminary and liberal arts background there was at least a covert looking down upon such "worldly" or "base and mechanical" things in favor of the contemplative life or theoria.

(63) "Fidelity to the earth" is Zarathustra's basic charge to his disciples against at least one strong strand in Christianity, exemplified by Dostoievski's Fr. Ferapont in Brothers Karamazov. See my "Monasticism, Eternity, and the Heart: Hegel, Nietzsche, and Dostoievski," Philosophy and Theology 13, no. 1 (Winter 2001): 193-211.