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 THEORY AND PRACTICEA distinction, whatever else it is, is a holding apart. So it is a divorce, adichotomy, whether in the conceptual realm alone or in things themselves.Many philosophers have indeed denied that there can ever be any validdistinction in reason which is not also in reality. The formalities of thought,they want to say, reflect a yet deeper formality on the part of "things". Soto the subtlest modality of thought there will necessarily correspond a
distinctio formalis a parte rei
, in the words of Duns Scotus, here, one mightso interpret, taking the fundamental step away from the near-totalmedieval reliance upon Aristotle towards the idealism later judgedessential.In medieval thought and life this separation was especially instanced inthe cleavage between the "active" life of 
 praxis
and the "contemplative"life of 
theoria
. The active life belonged to our existence in time, thecontemplative life already participated in eternity. So the active life, towhich most men and women are assigned, did not participate in eternity,in "heaven". For them it was a mere condition for heaven's attainment. The moral virtues, that is, Aristotelian habits though supernaturalised bygrace, by charity in particular, were needed for the conduct of practical lifeand for reaching man's Last End,
finis ultimus
, natural or supernatural. Theseries in reality terminated or, in practical reasoning, commenced by thisend was not, all the same, in essence temporal. The end is one's aim orpurpose and participation in eternity is not properly a "fore"-taste. There isno absolute before and after.We find Aristotle saying that contemplation,
theoria
, is itself the highestpraxis. The schema, that is, has its limits, is finite, not absolute. Thecategory of "performative" utterances might thus be extended into anyutterance whatever. Utterance is an action, a
 praxis
, and we can extendthis idea to thinking itself, the thought,
Gedanke
, which elicits the words,the utterance. Aristotle there denies the separation, expressing a monism.Action and contemplation become interchangeable names, should wespeak for example of love or study. I can either see my work, my loving,my artistic creativeness, as prolonged contemplation, as thinking, or I cansee my thinking, my listening to music, my "letting being be", as theplace, the occasion, where I am most active, most alive, most practically"engaged".****************************************** The Hegelian philosophy, or that of Nicholas of Cusa, and its dialectic has"thematised" this feature of reversal consequent upon the finitude of ourconcepts. This reversibility itself discloses the core of what we call mind oreven, as spirit, existence. Yet this disclosure, in overcoming truth'shiddenness, revolutionises truth itself, answers Pilate's question anew. Itanswers it, however, by recalling us to the original answer, to an absolutesubjectivity. Hence it reveals the essential in the "ecumenical movement".It summons us, namely, to the summit of the dialectic, where whateverpath taken leads.
 
 Thus the reciprocal substitutibility of theory and practice as finiteopposites is further instanced as between materialism and spiritualism. This comes out once a certain step has been taken, common to bothparties, that, namely, of consigning everyday experience to a realm of "misperception". For many philosophers, as for physicists, time is anillusion of immediate consciousness merely and the same applies tomatter conceived as extended stuff, for example. For Descartes matterwas already not the stuff itself, but pure extension. Now, however, theextension, space, has been relativised along with time.So we may find a world of timeless spirits postulated as alone absolute. Allthat is perceived, could we but overcome time's illusion, is one another,other spirits. The self, all the same, is admitted to be out and outparadoxical. Even knowledge or thought itself is argued misperceivedinsofar as taken as final reality. This is, rather, something more perfectlyreciprocal, such as we best know in our notion and experience of love. Thisis McTaggart's philosophy.Or we have a world, charted by "materialist" psychoanalytic theory, wherethe infant attains to the possession of mind as a kind of neurotic defenceagainst the external and hostile (Freud, Klein), where what is taken intoself, as nipple into mouth, gets (mis)represented as affirmation, andnegation converts what is spat out. Mind is a kind of dream we weave forourselves. But here we must notice that matter itself, the surrounding"viscosity" thus interpreted, is woven by, into and with precisely this mind.Mind, at an earlier period, wanted to define mind against or within its ownundefined operation. Now it reintegrates and indeed absorbs matter. It nolonger "matters", therefore, if one is materialist or spiritualist, for onemonism is as good as another if we are simply dealing with
schemata
, aset of symbols with which to represent ourselves to ourselves. For everyset of symbols is not just a consciousness but consciousness itself, an"intentional system". This is the mutual cancelling or "identity indifference". So if the animals have consciousness in this sense they havesymbols and signs. Yet they may well themselves be but signs of our owndevising, unless disguised others. Animal consciousness though taken assuch is merely analogously so, a relation to a partial environment like oursto reality as a whole. Yet we typically, and "neurotically", scale down thisrational to an environment, when we adopt a finitely exclusive intellectualstripe. Ecumenism requires of us such an admission, to which, we claim,the zigzag dialectic of the ages has brought us. The monism of self in other, other in self, lay coiled, along with theparadox, in the Greco-Thomist account of knowledge as requiring that we"have" the other as other. The verb is here replaceable by "be" while thequalification "intentionally" disappears as we penetrate into the logic, themind and heart, of love as term of knowledge, its final
sapientia
. Just asthe spiritualists deny matter, so we can also say that matter, as irrational,that is to say perishable and potential, denies itself. What is perishable hasperished or, rather, never was, is not. Dualism is a psychic device forholding reality at a distance, preserving an illusory autonomy, which oneyet disguises under an inauthentic submission to law. Everything here getssubverted, freedom confused with indifference.
 
It was though very hard to abandon dualism, its clinging vestiges, to castall one's cares away, become what one was not, go through what one isnot, find self in other. The case is similar, psychologically at least, with theinfantile desire to be loved, perpetuated in the "neurotic" family. Theteaching of St. Francis, that "it is in loving that we are loved" is, however, aliteral truth. It requires that we no longer dance to the tune of others. There is a time when one needs to do that, as others, too, will no doubtfollow us, for a time. But we must say to them, "Greater things shall youdo than I have done." Everything, in short, has to be generalised. Only bydaring to do this do we confirm the original wisdom "from above", thusourselves becoming man.
 Agnosce, o christiane, dignitatem tuam
. Thiscommission rings down the ages and we, other sheep in another fold,continue to fulfil it.*************************************''' The point is this. It is reason itself which represents reason as emergingout of the irrational, called material. This position though is untenable, thatis, contradictory. The rational cannot emerge out of the irrational withoutbeing one among that mass of imagined processes from which it imaginesitself to emerge. That is, nothing that is not irrational can emerge from theirrational. For nothing emerges from it and that is what the irrationalmeans.What this means though is that the irrational cannot rationally be thought,since if I am thinking then the rational is there, of which we have said thatit cannot thus emerge. It is a simple necessity. And if the irrational shouldbe there with no connection to some supposedly emergent rationalismthen there is no need to think or attempt to think it at all. That, rather,would be arbitrary and so doubly irrational. This means again that the hypothesis, within a dominant materialism, of emergent rationality is no more than a picture or model, an inconsistentone indeed. The hypothesis of evolution, that is, elicits idealism as aframe, indeed, within which and within which alone evolution can bepostulated without contradiction, since idealism leaves science just as it is,even if it situates scientific knowledge as a whole somewhat differently. To affirm an ordered material creation, on the other hand, is to becommitted to a dualism of finite and infinite which is equally contradictory,as if the finite, in order to exist, must limit the infinite or unlimited. Talk of "ontological discontinuity", as a way out of this, merely returns one toidealism without saying so. The being not continuous with divine being isthen not distinguishable from a divine
idea
, of being or of anything elseindifferently. Or, if one cannot conceive of ideas without intentionality,then speak of dreams, veils, categories. Existence, which Hegel calls apoor category, is also called, by McTaggart, a species of the real merely. Thus while for Aquinas
viventibus esse est vivere
for Hegel life is not theultimate category, as is shown, quite simply, by its outcome in death.Death does not come to life from outside or contingently. It is the indexmerely of the finitude of the conception of an organic unity of parts withina whole.
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