Retracing Reality: A Philosophical Itinerary, Marie-Dominique Philippe, OP (London: T&T Clark, 1999)
p. 15 …the true quality of an intellect is in its capacity to induce, to discover the proper principles of an experienced reality….
18 It is from a work of art that the first distinction between form and matter is drawn.
23
The experience of friendship reveals to me what a friend is: someone who is my personal good, someone who is capable of perfecting me, fulfilling me, revealing to me who I am because he is my friend, because he loves me, and because I am also his personal good. 24
Indeed, absence favors the development of the imagination, which easily idealizes the one we love. 25
A friend loves his friend for himself and not because of his qualities. … Love is immediately determined by the friend in his personal goodness…. …the one loved is also in the inmost depths of the one who loves. Ecstasy involves a new interiority….27 …means never impose themselves as necessity. … Intention is to the moral life what inspiration––the source of every project––is to the artistic life.
32 [
vécu, the subjective repercussions of experience upon an individual]
35 Cooperation at the community level requires a minimum of three persons.
38
The common good of the family allows the child to become an autonomous human person, with a capacity to discover his own end and orient himself, in a free choice, towards his end. For this, a family milieu must be created.44 …if a physical reality is not moved towards its own end, it is moved by chance. Now, what is moved by chance does not have a proper cause; it therefore occurs accidentally. … natural movements are ordered and therefore imply a certain end.
45 Physical reality only exists in the present moment. … 'That-which-is' determines the judgment of existence. How that-which-is exists, conditions the judgment of existence.
57 n. 4 …intentionality is essentially ordered to reality.
60 Individual instinct at the level of nutriment is ordered to sexual instinct, as the individual is ordered to the species. … Procreation gives biological life its ultimate meaning. … Might there be a kind of intention of eternity in species? … Life is transmitted with superabundance. Matter, on the contrary, contracts and limits.
63 ['proper sensibles' vs. 'common sensibles'] For Aristotle, the objectivity of our sensations is ultimately based upon the 'proper sensibles.' Here, contact with the existent reality is primary from the sensitive viewpoint. According to Descartes, however, the objectivity of our sensations is ultimately based upon the 'common sensibles,' because only these sensibles are directly measurable.
72
An imminent difficult-to-overcome evil arouses in us the passion of despair which saps all our strength.74 The passions incarnate themselves in man's gait and behavior.
78 …all reasoning is brought to completion in a judgment, just as all becoming ends in that-which-is.
84 …our will is first a capacity for spiritual, personal love, and not first a power for efficacy, or efficiency, as Descartes asserts.
86 Choice is a spiritual act where cooperation between the intellect and spiritual love is perfect.
96 …substance… an irreplaceable originality of being. … The intellect discovers a source which radiates in all that he is. Substance, as principle and cause of that-which-is, is thus beyond the distinction between body and soul.
100 The primary division of mobile being… is the division between form-matter and nature-matter…. The primary division of that-which-is considered as being is the division between substance and the secondary determinations (accidents).
104 Being-in-act is
end in the strongest, fullest sense, for being in potency is entirely and essentially rendered to it.
106 We do not have a single intuitive perspective on being, but two: substance-being and act-being…. Being grasped as act is end-being…. Being-in-act is so ultimate that we do not have a quidditative grasp of it…. What we grasp is a reality that exists, not being-in-act. … Only at the end of an induction does out intellect grasp being-in-act.
107 Essence, precisely speaking, cannot be by itself. Essence is, as it were, a capacity to be. … It only exists thanks to a particular act of being. Moreover, even if the essence has a certain intelligibility, we can only rasp this intelligibility from the reality's act of being. … the intelligibility of reality is not ultimate.
108–109 [five modes of being-in-act] …everything in potency is ordered to and, in its being, depends upon being-in-act. This is the principle of final causality at the level of that-which-is….
(1) Essence is ordered to and depends on
esse;
(2) Natural appetite is ordered to an depends upon a good;
(3) The power of intellectual knowledge is ordered to truth;
(4) All vital powers are ordered to vital operation;
(5) Mobile being is ordered to movement. …
(1) That-which-is moved is moved by another;
(2) That-which-moves-itself moves itself by another;
(3) Judgment depends on truth;
(4) Appetite is ordered to the good;
(5) All possible essence is ordered to
esse.
112 …being-in-potency is the foundation of all multiplicity.
113 Autonomy of the self is based upon the radical autonomy of substance in the order of being.
121
appanage: ??
125 …
[creatio] ex nihilo… not 'labor' but pure gift.
127
Creation is the gift of being….139 …pure potentiality (matter) allows love to manifest its gratuitousness. Is matter not, as it were, a great symbol of the poverty of a creature who is pure receptivity in the presence of its Creator and Father?
156 …sapiential judgment explicitly entails a new judgment of existence. The only way we can speak of the First Being is to affirm that he exists, for we have no 'idea' about him, no 'concept' proper to him.
157 If the first judgment is altered or set aside, once can no longer discover the existence of the First Being and the judgment of wisdom no longer has meaning.
"Мир спасет красота. Beauty will save the world."
