아래의 글은 퍼온 글임다..

..........................................................

 

[2001-11-12 09:19:53]

 

 

.. 다음은 D.R. Griffin의 아퀴나스와 하이데거와 화이트헤드에 관한 짧은
비교입니다. 제가 다 소화시키지 못 한 글을 옮긴는게 마음에 걸리지만,
혹시 도움이 될까해서 올립니다.

 

 

"Thomas Aquinas, although he was anticipated by others, was the theologian who most throughly identified God with being. Presupposing Aristotle's analysis of matter and form, he saw that neither of them nor their combination could account for the very being of things. What is required, he argued is an act of being, Which he called being itself, esse ipsum. Thomas identified this act of being with God, defined as that Being whose very essence it is to exis. Contingent beings exist by virtue of their participation in being itself, which means that God is the necessary ground of their being. For Thomas, then, God is not only a concrete being, the God of the Bible, but also being itself.

 

it is this equation that Whitehead's position rejects. One basis for Whitehead's different view is that he no longer needed to affirm an act of being different from the matterial cause of all things. Whereas Thomas followed Aristotle in regarding matter as passive, developments in modern physics have led to the idea that which all things embody is dynamic activity, better describable as energy than as matter. Enlarging this notions to creativity, Whitehead had a concept that not only filled the role played by the Thomistic act of being but also could replace, rather than merely supplement, the Aristotelian matter. Then, given the idea that this creativity itself - this being itself, this act of being - is simply the stuff of which all actual beings exist, it was obvious that it could not a being, so that it could not intelligibly be called God.

 

Parallel with this rejection of the identification of being itself with a supreme being on the part of Whitehead and his followers has been an even more explicit rejection of it by Martin Heidegger and his followers. The "onto-theological" metaphysical tradition, Heidegger argued, had blurred the all-important "ontological difference" between being(Sein) and beings (Seinde) - which is exactly parallel with Whitehead's distinction between creativity and actual entities. Once this ontological difference is seen, Heidegger insisted, the equation of being itself (esse ipsum) with any being, even a necessary being (esse ipsum subsistens), is unintelligible. "

 

 

D.R. Griffin, Reenchantment without Supernaturalism, Ithaca and London: Cornell University press, 2001. pp.269-270. 
 

 2001-11-12 09:19:53