Very<\/i> roughly and tentatively, but good enough perhaps for the purposes of a blog discussion or an introduction to philosophy, one could say that there are two basic metaphysical positions, with a third that is a variation of one of those two. <\/p>\n
According to the first position, whatever is ultimate–for Christians, God–is one kind of basic being, an uncreated one, and the created world is another kind of basic being. The two kinds of being, uncreated and created, are related in virtue of the fact that the second kind of being is created by the first, and that relation is described as participation or analogy. For example, we are like God in goodness, wisdom, and justice, even though his goodness, wisdom, and justice transcends ours to such a degree that we cannot really understand it. (We usually assume that this metaphysical position requires belief in creation ex nihilo<\/i>.) <\/p>\n
According to the second position, first adumbrated by Duns Scotus, “being” has only one meaning, whether it refers to created being or uncreated being. If I say “God exists,” then “exists” means the same thing in that sentence that it means when I say “Aardvarks exist.” We can, of course, wonder what “being” can mean when it refers to God as well as to the everyday world with which we are familiar and which is so different in seemingly every way from God. One answer to that question is modern materialism (the third, derivative position): essentially, to be means to exist in space and time. Though it is notoriously difficult to parse carefully what that means for things like mental functions and numbers, I think we have a sufficient intuitive grasp of materialism to use the term meaningfully. One need not be a materialist to subscribe to the metaphysical claim that there is only one kind of being, but it is by far the most common contemporary version of “the univocity of being.” <\/p>\n
It is relatively simple to understand what “transcendence” means for the first kind of metaphysics. Uncreated being is transcendent of created being because it is the origin of the latter and by being its origin gives it meaning. However, what transcendence means in the second case is much less obvious. Indeed, it is relatively simple to argue that there can be no coherent notion of transcendence for the second kind of metaphysics because, by its very nature, transcendence means there is some kind of being that is other than that of the ordinary world. Without transcendence of some kind, however, it is difficult to see how to avoid nihilism: there is no source of meaning if there is no transcendence. <\/p>\n
Where does that put Mormons? At first glance, it seems impossible for us to believe that there is more than one kind of being and, so, impossible for us to speak of participation and analogy. Most of the time we more or less naturally assume that our metaphysics is of the second type. But if it is, in what sense can we meaningfully speak of transcendence? Are we secretly, unbeknownst to ourselves, nihilists? <\/p>\n
I can think of two ways out of this problem: (1) Perhaps we are really in the first camp: every intelligence, as an uncreated being, has being in a different sense than every other one. If so, then we believe in an infinite number of kinds of being (rather than only two). We might believe in an infinite number of kinds of being but no created being per se<\/i>. There may be an infinite number of possible arrangements of the infinite number of beings (which doesn’t necessarily imply no limits on the possibilities), but no new beings–an infinity of uncreated being but no created being. In that case, it would also mean that “Mormon materialism” has less in common with contemporary materialism than we often assume. And it would mean that transcendence is possible, though a transcendence quite different than we usually think it. Each other person, for example, would be transcendent of me (and not only persons). <\/p>\n
Or (2) a number of recent thinkers have worked to argue that the univocity of being (whether modern materialism or something else) doesn’t preclude transcendence: transcendence in immanence. On this view, meaning doesn’t have to be given to it by something transcendent, but is part and parcel of immanence. Most ways of thinking the transcendence of immanence involve beginning with the Heideggerian idea that to be always means to be in relation and that relation is in itself meaningful. This position put us more in contact with contemporary, non-reductivist materialism, though it isn’t obvious that what is contemporary is or ought to be the touchstone for our metaphysics. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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