Afterthought to the previous post

 

This is a difficult nut to crack as I am trying to bring to word something that sits exactly at the fault-line between three temptations: 1) the intellectualist one (being = essence = definition); 2) the constructivist one (being = meaning for us); and 3) the romantic/expressivist one (being = what moves us) (cf. Charles Taylor, Hegel). And my thought is that all three are partly right and partly disastrously wrong. Aquinas helps crack this nut, but only if we read him dynamically enough. The difficult nut is this: How can the being of the tree exceed our conceptual grasp, be genuinely disclosed in affect, use, symbol, etc., and yet not be constituted by them? How can emotion be cognitively revealing without cognition becoming purely subjective?

My move to the Idea in the divine intellect is a way of saying that the intelligibility of the tree is richer than any one mode of reception. So that scientific description, the carpenter’s use, poetic encounter, childhood memory, mythical symbol, or aesthetic delight, can each be finite receptions of real perfections grounded in what the tree is.

But then for me the Heideggerian worry inevitably returns. What stops people from seeing “trees as standing reserve” (mere resources to be exploited) as just another legitimate disclosure among others? And my answer has to be that not all disclosures are equally attuned to the being (the intelligible being: Eidos) of the tree. Some attend to what the thing is and can be in itself; others attend only to what it can be for us under a regime of use (industrialism). The forgetfulness of being begins when a derivative relation (usable-as-timber) is taken as exhaustive of the thing’s intelligibility/being. That is not another translation; it is a mistranslation by reduction. So adequatio becomes (in finite knowers) not perfect coincidence, but the ongoing discipline of allowing the thing to measure our articulations of it.

And that is why this question is hard. I am trying to describe knowing as neither mirroring nor making but as a form of attending to the thing itself that can succeed or fail. Which is exactly why the translation analogy is so inviting (but also dangerous).