What is a World? Reflections on the Noosphere (With Some Focus on its Artistic and Technological Domains)
The present essay is a longer form of a paper to be delivered, at a more popular level, at the “Faith and Innovation Summit” held at St. Vincent College, Latrobe PA, by The Saint Vincent Center for Catholic Thought and Culture.
What is “the world”? At first glance, the question seems almost too obvious. We are tempted to gesture in every direction and say: all of that is the world. It is what lies before our eyes, under our feet, and above our heads—the shared “stuff” and space that surrounds us and stands between us.
Yet a little reflection makes the matter immediately less simple. Our language itself multiplies worlds: the plant world, the academic world, the political world, the wide world of sports. If we press the distinctions, we find nearly as many “worlds” as there are forms of life and patterns of human activity. There are many worlds on the one world that is this island earth.
And still, the singular is not meaningless. We speak coherently of “world peace,” a worldwide economy, even “global” ecological systems. The unity is real, even if it is not uniform. A local cold snap in eastern North America is intelligible only within broader atmospheric patterns—and those same patterns can leave a ski season in the western United States strangely deficient. Even our local weather belongs to a larger whole.
Hidden, then, within the question—What is “the world”?—is an old philosophical pairing: the one and the many. Wherever we use the little verb is, we quickly meet the question of unity. To the degree that something is, it is in some way one—whole, undivided, itself.1 human being remains the same human being amid bodily and personal change. And despite new buildings, new personnel, and curricular shifts, St. Vincent remains—twenty years after my graduation—recognizably St. Vincent.
But discerning the source and limits of unity is not always easy. Organisms have an obvious wholeness; institutions and nations less so. Some alumni can reasonably wonder whether a college remains “the same” after deep transformations. And one can even ask whether the nations of Europe before the twentieth-century wars are simply “the same” political realities as those now gathered within the European Union. I do not raise this to provoke controversy, but to name a metaphysical difficulty: when the form is complex, unity becomes harder to discern, especially when it is a question of political forms.2 And the term “world” is more complex still.
Hidden, then, in our question—”What is ‘the world?’”—is the entire question of being, the metaphysical question that really matters, the one that the particular tradition to which I belong—the Thomist line of Scholasticism—believes is the central question of metaphysics, the queen of the purely contemplative philosophical disciplines. And we are faced with it in many different domains: what is the being of physical things? What is the being of organisms (are they more than “merely physical things”)? What is the being of consciousness? What is the being of moral and political entities? What is the being of “the World”?
In each of the examples above, we named a more-or-less complete particular world: plants, the academy, politics, sports. It is tempting to think that each of these “worlds” is made up of a relatively static collection of individual things that function as the “furniture” of that particular world. The world of plants would then be made up of oaks, pines, moss, grass, and so on; the political world, of nations; the world of sports, of leagues and players. But this furniture is only part of the story. The members of each of these “worlds” exist as a dynamic whole. The beings in these worlds act in relation to one another. Plants exist as complex ecosystems (integrally connected to the world of animals and the physical environment as well). The community of nations exists as a community only to the degree that its members interact, whether in the pursuit of common goods or, alas, in relations of hostility. In other words, worlds do not merely exist; they also act. They pose at once the question of being and the question of the horizons of meaning and action.
Therefore, the question—What is “the world”?—has real urgency. Like all other beings, we are “worldly”: we live within horizons of meaning and action, even when we cannot clearly define those very horizons. How we answer the question, What is the world?, will implicitly shape what we think about ourselves, about our way of being with one another, and—if we make room for Him in our notion of world—about our relation to the Other who is God. There is, therefore, something moral at stake as well. To gain even a partial clarity about the world-stage (or, as we will see, world-stages) of our action inevitably presses the further question: What should we do in this world—or in these worlds?
This is analogous to the way the good metaphysician, truly attentive to reality, should respond when he or she comes to glimpse—however faintly and with whatever difficulty—that there is a Cause and Source of all that is. Such a metaphysician knows that the speculative cannot remain merely speculative. The long, analogical ascent to God by natural reason gives way to a moral demand: one must now ask, What does this mean for me? And the wise person will recognize that, both in being and in operation, God deserves to be acknowledged, for “there is nothing that bears witness to an intellect more informed and more aware of the true place of man in this universe, where God is first and man second.”3
But there is more to human life than any single domain taken in isolation. For that very reason, the question of “worlds” matters for understanding the many things we must do—in the world. The way these worlds are layered, ordered, and given priority silently shapes our sense of what is basic, what is derivative, what is to be received, and what is to be mastered. We have already noted the ambiguity of the term “world.” We will now consider, in a more orderly way, some of the most evident layers of worldhood that we inhabit. Amid these various worlds, we will seek to situate the uniquely human world—or, more accurately, the plurality of human worlds.
The guiding claim of what follows is this: what we today call “technology” is not merely a collection of tools or techniques within the human world, but increasingly a way the world as such is disclosed to us—as material for use, optimization, and control. In this sense, technology functions as a worldview: a horizon within which other worlds are interpreted and reordered. Before we can assess this technological worldview—whether it is fitting to the truth of human being and action—we must first become attentive to the layered structure of worldhood itself.
From physical worlds to the noetic world. Let us return to the physical world and try to view it, at least provisionally, as a unified system. Even within the physical and natural sciences, we distinguish various domains according to forms of physical and causal cohesion: the geosphere, the biosphere, the atmosphere, and so on. This descriptive layering does not, of itself, settle the philosophical question of whether these various “strata” of reality are metaphysically distinct. In other words, the natural sciences need not take a position on questions of materialism, the “chain of being,” or related metaphysical disputes. Their facts are not, strictly speaking, philosophical conclusions, nor are their guiding concerns philosophical ones.4
If we begin with the geosphere, we have the clearest physical “world” to which we can point. In this respect, the earth shares with other terrestrial planets5 the character of having a physicality that we can immediately indicate. Yet even the most elementary investigation reminds us that this apparently unified “world” consists of a variety of component aspects, variously solid and liquid. Moreover, it is not closed in upon itself. It has effects that extend beyond its immediate surface, such as the earth’s surrounding magnetosphere, which reaches even beyond the atmosphere. Were we to limit our notion of “the world” to this system of geological realities alone, we would leave out many elements of the interconnected whole that is the globe of the earth.
Something similar can be said about the atmosphere. I remarked earlier, somewhat lightheartedly, on the weather in the Rockies during this rather dry 2025–2026 ski season. Yet major storm trajectories, pollution patterns, and broader cycles of warming and cooling all testify to the fact that, under these blue—and, in Latrobe, often gray—skies, we live within a single atmospheric whole that circles the globe. The various local patterns of weather are intelligible only within this greater system. Admittedly, the bonds are relatively loose and often difficult to predict. Nonetheless, we can say, in a certain sense, that one “world” in which we live is the combined system of the ground below us and the skies above us.
And yet, even this is not the whole world. Despite the beauty of high mountains and the scorching heat of the earth’s depths, despite the patterns of weather that lead us to care about far-flung conditions—praying that hurricanes will not strike our shores and that perhaps more snow will fall for the skiers—how much would still be left out were we to limit our outlook to these geo-atmospheric bounds? We would leave aside the entire world of interconnected life patterns among viruses, plants, and animals—and, of course, the unique “world” of human affairs, which will be most important for our considerations today.
Thus we arrive at what we can broadly call the biosphere: the relatively thin physical and biological “world” extending from the lowest depths of the oceans that can still sustain life to comparable heights in the mountains. Here too we encounter a system whose unification is at once localized and yet also, in an important sense, global. Within the biosphere there are particular environments—one might even speak of localized evolutionary “worlds”—in which plants and animals have so closely adapted to a given biome that their entire pattern of life is structured by the idiosyncrasies of that place, with its distinctive weather, tidal patterns, and rhythms of biological growth.
Yet at the same time, we know that the globe of the earth—the outer surface of the geosphere—is the stage for an interconnected biosphere as well. This interconnection is evident not only in shared atmospheric and oceanic conditions, but more strikingly in the migratory patterns of living beings, both regular and accidental. The thin living skin of the planet thus represents a world in which particular life patterns of plants and animals overlap in interdependent—and at times conflicting—ways.
I would like, however, to indicate something pivotal about the novelty of the zoological portion of the biosphere. The threshold of cognition marks a decisive shift in what we mean by a “world,” for the life-pattern of each cognizing animal constitutes something like a species-specific world of interpretation and action. In the philosophical tradition descending from the Arabic–Aristotelian line, this active interpretation of a life-world is accounted for by what was called an “internal” sense—that is, a capacity, with clear neurological and organic conditions, that extends beyond the mere immediacy of the environment here and now: the power of estimation.6
A classic medieval example is that this estimative power enables the sheep to apprehend the “enemy-ness” of the wolf within its environment. The example can sound flippant, but it touches upon a serious point. Consider a slightly different case. It is poisonous for sheep to consume plants of the genus yew. To the extent that sheep can register the distinctive taste of these plants as harmful, they avoid eating them. Within the sheep’s experiential framework, the yew has a meaning one would never infer from a purely botanical study of yew trees. The sheep encounters the yew as “non-edible-for-it” and therefore avoids it. By contrast, animals such as deer—though potentially affected by yew—will attempt to eat parts of the plant during the winter season; they “estimate” it as, in some measure, edible-for-them. Various birds, in turn, can eat the berries of yew plants while discarding their seeds, which are among the poisonous elements. In each of these cases, the interpretive framework guiding life and action is species-specific: sheep, deer, and birds inhabit the same physical environment, yet disclose it according to different horizons of meaning. It takes a particular perceptual capacity for each animal to experience what, within a given environment, counts as food, threat, or resource for it.
These sorts of relationships—cognitionally grasped and affectively responded to by animals—constitute a given animal’s (and its group’s) particular sphere of meaning and action, referred to by Jakob von Uexküll and the semioticians who followed him as the animal’s Umwelt. This notion is often taken to refer to an “inner world” that is wholly subjective and sharply distinct from the physical environment itself. From the perspective of the scholastic accounts of cognition, however, this “self-world” of the animal represents not a retreat from the physical world but a kind of elevation of it.
In the developed scholastic theory of cognitive union, even our most basic sensory contact with the world involves a new mode of presence to things, which they variously describe as objective or intentional existence. Thomas Aquinas will even speak of this as being, in a certain respect, non-material and “in some way spiritual.”7 The physical heating of the hand is one thing; the experience of heat is another. All the more is this true of the highly interpretive “internal” sensation involved in animal estimation and of the memorative capacity by which animals retain not merely past sensations but past evaluative encounters with their environment, forming a reservoir for prospective action here and now.
I must stress that this is not a matter of merely distinguishing an external physical environment from an internal realm of psychological “qualia.” External physical beings act upon the neurological capacities of animals and thereby communicate something of their intelligibility—however fragmentary—thus specifying the capacities for external sensation. Yet, precisely because the animal soul exists at a level of structural integration higher than the merely physical, and even higher than the vegetative level, it can receive this information not only in a physical manner but also in a cognitional manner, as an object of both cognition and appetite.
In this way, the animal enters into a relation with its environment in which it becomes, more clearly than the plant, a source of agency and activity. In short, especially through the gradual integration of many experiences by estimation and memory, the animal becomes, in a real sense, a maker of its own world within the physical environment that surrounds it. This semiotic and agentive capacity of animals to weave together a distinctive and higher life-pattern is precisely what draws so much of our human interest toward the animal kingdom and its manifold forms of life. It is within this massive and variegated domain that animals and the phyto-physical sphere together form a plurality of “worlds.”8
Nature does not, however, come to rest at the level of zoosemiotics. There is a higher domain still: that of human intelligence and volition. Among embodied beings, the human soul stands as a kind of horizon between two worlds—between the still-embodied cognitional and appetitive life of animals and the domain of spirituality. Our soul is at once spiritually self-subsistent and yet also the structuring act (the “form”) of the body.9 This means that our way of being embodied opens onto a new horizon, the horizons of spirituality—indeed, in a certain sense, onto the horizon of being as such.
Intellectual life unfolds within this horizon of being. Through defining, judging, and reasoning, we are continually “magnetized” by the desire to grasp the stable, intelligible raisons d’être of the realities we encounter so fleetingly in sense experience. This is the generative source of the sciences and of our broader inquiries into the meaning of things. Yet this mode of knowledge also opens vast domains for action. The human person does not merely register given ends to be pursued, as in the estimative life of animals; we grasp the very being and meaning of being-an-end—that something is to be achieved as an end—and we can deliberate about a plurality of means in view of that end, all the more so as the end itself is richer and more complex. This is evident not only in the high and lofty achievements of the fine arts, but also in the most ordinary textures of shared life. Living together—or even simply sharing a common meal—opens onto a surprisingly wide field of possible realizations: an almost endless variety of dwelling-forms, social arrangements, cuisines, and meal practices.10
Thus, if the Umwelt of various animals represents a kind of “world-building,” this is doubly—and indeed triply—true in the case of the human world, filled as it is with the dense network of human culture and its artifacts and practices. We find ourselves, in other words, faced with another “world”: one that remains within the spheres already mentioned—for we are embodied and, in that respect, share in animal life—yet also represents something genuinely new, such that human creativity cannot be reduced to the particular semiotics of the animal kingdom. Here we enter the domain of embodied spiritual intelligence and volitionality—what we may call the noosphere or the noetic world (from νοῦς, naming the capacity for understanding, judging, desiring, and ordering).11 It is to this domain that we must now turn if we are to trace out the human world within the broader physical world, seeing the human as the highest level within the overall movement of the universe: unique, yet not wholly separate from the shared framework of semiotics and agency that pervades the lower orders of life.12
The dimensions of the noetic world.13 The human intellect and will are made—are, if you will, “tuned”—for being. At the heart of our intelligence lies a fundamental distinction between intelligence ordered primarily to knowing and intelligence ordered to the direction of human action, whether moral or more broadly practical. This is the familiar division between speculative intelligence and practical intelligence. Let us begin by considering speculative intelligence.
We speak of “intellectual culture” to name those domains of shared human activity in which we become collaborators in the search for truth about reality. The disciplines of a college or university bear witness to this culture. Even an introductory course in computer science, biology, or chemistry requires the student to purchase a textbook that condenses centuries of inquiry and experiment. One may rightly bristle at the exorbitant cost of such books—and suspect that publishers are keenly aware of the revenue such volumes generate. Yet if we imagine a post-apocalyptic world in which the institutions of learning have collapsed and most books have vanished, we gain a sharper sense of what such volumes represent: between two covers, we possess the distilled labor of countless minds and generations of disciplined inquiry within a given field.
But of course, the being of a book is more than its merely physical being. This is precisely the mark of the “noetic being” that we imprint upon the artifacts we make. Through the cultural forms of language, layout, and disciplinary method, paper and ink become bearers of meaning—that is, signs of human mind, as it were incarnated in the matter of our textbooks. It is not a matter of the book existing merely as a physical object that could, for example, be burned for fuel, alongside some separate “mental content” formed in me in disconnected parallel when I look at the page. Rather, this pulp and this ink are, at once, the book’s physical being and—according to the distinctive mode of being that belongs within the space of human knowledge and volition, the sphere of the noetic world—an expressive container of intelligibility, initiating the reader into the habits of mind proper to a given science. In its “natural” being, the book is flammable; in its “noetic” being, it can set the world of the mind on fire.14
But this is only a beginning. As students continue in their studies, they become participants in a community of intelligence, able to communicate about the many subjects and objects investigated and reflected upon within a given scientific culture.15 In this way, we learn to articulate the intelligible structure of things—to explain and to explore the truths proper to a given field of inquiry. We become, in a real sense, agents of truth: articulators of the joints of the being of things, grasping their definitions, principles, and the inferences that bind known truths together within a discipline.16 In so doing—both individually and, above all, as a community of knowers extending across generations—we confer upon the realities we know a distinctive mode of presence: the being of being discoursed.
In the case of practical knowledge, we are concerned with something other than “pure knowing” or knowledge for its own sake. Here we are concerned with the domain of action. We might say that practical knowledge is ordered toward imprinting human intelligibility upon our deeds and artifacts. Such knowledge is twofold. Traditionally, it is distinguished into the moral and the artistic (or technical). The latter will be of greatest interest for us. But let us first note a few words about the moral.
Our experience is saturated with moral significance. Even when you drive down the road, before you encounter a single stop sign or speed-limit marker, you already know that the world you inhabit places real demands upon you: you must not cross solid lines; you may pass where lines are broken; you must never drive head-on into oncoming traffic. Part of acquiring the moral use of vehicular transportation lies in learning to read these practical signs—simple as they are in their physical form—as measures of your activity. And society acknowledges the shared moral meaning of these signs by sanctioning, at least at times, those who violate the rules they indicate to drivers on these roads.
However, this sort of moral being is all around.17 Flowers in a vase are not merely slowly dying plants cut off from their roots; they can also be a sign of a spouse’s love for his wife. Parents know well that certain practices must be cultivated within the household if children are gradually to be formed in the disciplines of mature living. More broadly, we recognize that it matters how we treat certain persons and institutions—as though they occupy a distinctive place within the shared moral order of society. A great deal of architecture expresses more than aesthetic perfection. It can function as a kind of rhetorical statement about the moral gravity of the activities that take place within a given building. There is something incongruous about regularly holding legislative assemblies at card tables in a back alley. The particular grandeur of state houses makes a statement both to citizens and to representatives: to the former, it signifies the general obedience owed to laws duly promulgated and enforced; to the latter, it should recall the public gravity of their labors as members of a governing body.
Daily, we experience the fact that this noetic space enables communication across space and time with remarkable speed. The most obvious phenomenon to note is technology itself and the shared knowledge made possible by computational storage and networks. Yet more fundamentally, we can consider the way we constantly interact as members of a community of nations and economies—often without explicit awareness, yet always finding our activity situated within a network of socio-political meanings that structures shared action. Even the seemingly individualist world of capitalist society, at the level of affect, rests upon a latticework of cooperation that would be unintelligible apart from the culture and commitments that sustain it.
The simple act of renting a stranger’s home through a house-sharing app is not merely a zero-sum exchange—I get your house for two days; you get five hundred dollars. The preparation and use of such spaces presuppose shared practices of trust and mutual respect that we tend to take for granted as part of the semiotics of the human world. We should not cease to be struck by the quiet achievement expressed in arriving at an unfamiliar home, finding it clean and prepared, sometimes even discovering food left as a gesture of hospitality, and then taking care to leave the place in good order. Such interactions cannot be reduced to mere economic transactions. They presuppose a shared moral space between persons—a space that is neither natural necessity nor brute datum, but a historically formed achievement.
Even though moral progress is never a simple, linear ascent toward ever greater righteousness, there is nonetheless real development in moral consciousness, and this development is reflected in the evolving matrix of custom and civil law through which moral life takes institutional form in any given era. In this sense, we are moral agents within particular moral worlds, in which the possibilities of human flourishing are either expanded or constrained by the shared horizons of interpretation and action that characterize a culture—or even an epoch shaped by decisive historical events that leave their mark upon the noetic space of whole peoples.18
At long last, we arrive at the domain that is the point of reference for this conference: technology. I have taken the long way here in order to place some metaphysical tools in our hands and to linger over features of experience that can guide our insight into the phenomenon itself. It may seem odd to have delayed the explicit discussion of technology for so long. Yet the very familiarity of the works of our hands is precisely what makes their distinctive character easy to overlook. Technology belongs to the noetic world we inhabit as human beings, but it is a peculiarly powerful and easily misunderstood dimension of that world—one whose meaning can be grasped only if we first learn to see how worlds are layered, disclosed, and ordered in the first place.
For the moment, I would like to shift our focus from modern “technology” to the classical notion of art, or technē: practical reasoning ordered to things to be made and to non-moral practices to be performed. This domain encompasses a wide range of human activities, from the manual and fine arts to the building trades and engineering. It includes not only practices that culminate in stable products—buildings, paintings, bridges, software—but also performances in which the activity itself is the work of art, such as musical performance, dance, and even sport. In all of these cases, we are engaged in something deeply human, for in these “arts” we place human intelligibility into the actions and institutions that shape what the tradition calls factibilia: things—and non-moral practices—that are made.
The domain of art represents an immensely important dimension of human experience. Through artcraft, we do not merely fashion tools for use; we fabricate works that can bear intrinsic value. Even something as “useful” as the framing of a house can be appreciated for its own sake. Anyone who has seen a thoughtful framing design recognizes that there is a distinctive goodness—or, one might even say, a distinctive beauty—that arises from the completeness, proportion, and “radiance” of something well made.19 These same properties are found, in different ways, throughout the products of human artcraft.
This is obvious in the case of music, which requires a determinate arrangement of notes, instrumentation, and performance in order to be precisely what it is meant to be. But we know the same phenomenon in the world of sports as well. The reader can probably tell from my earlier examples that I am a skier. After a very good run down a demanding slope, under just the right conditions, one experiences a genuine kind of beauty in a well-executed performance: the right rhythm of turns, the stability of one’s line, the right speed for the given conditions. In all works of human hands that merit the name “art,” this distinctive form of excellence is possible—and it cannot be reduced either to speculative truth or to moral rectitude.20
The noetic world of culture is the highest flowering of nature and of natural being. Nature and culture are not heterogeneous layers related only with difficulty, nor are they opposed to one another—as though we would need either to return to a pre-cultural “pure nature,” as certain romantic impulses suggest, or to ascend toward a transhumanist future in which our natural substructure no longer bears upon the destiny of an allegedly disembodied “mind.” Rather, embodied spirituality names what being becomes when it reaches a certain threshold of perfection within the ordered progression of beings. As Fr. Serge-Thomas Bonino aptly summarizes: “Once this leap has been made, culture—the fruit of the interaction between nature and human spirituality—becomes a decisive factor in human evolution. The history of the human species is no longer governed by biological determinism alone.”21
Worldviews. It is one thing to speak of the different “worlds” that exist among entities, often with a kind of nested interrelation among them (the geosphere and atmosphere, for example, are preconditions for the biosphere, and all of these are presupposed by the embodied noetic world of human culture). It is another thing to consider how such worlds are interpretively framed within our awareness—how they are disclosed, valued, and ordered in relation to one another within the broader horizons of meaning that shape us as agents. Such framing gives rise to what we can call worldviews: ways of assigning priority to particular “worlds” within the plurality of worlds we inhabit, and thereby, in a real sense, of delineating the boundaries of reality within which we act and interpret our experience.
For example, a sound Catholic worldview identifies the primordial “world” of reality with the shared communion made possible by grace, by which we become members of the Church, Christ’s mystical body. In this light, the “world” is the temple that is Christ Himself—the whole Christ, head and members. For this reason, the primordial mystery of all things is the mystery of Christ: He is the firstborn of all creation, in whom all things “hold together” (Col 1:15–17). The mystery of the world is thus the mystery of the Whole Christ—not only in the faithful, but as radiant in all who are transfigured by their place within the Christocentric order of reality. From this perspective, the primary “world” is the dwelling place of God in Christ’s sacred humanity, into which all things are incorporated.
The other “worlds” we have discussed are not abolished by this vision, but ordered within it by way of subordination without elimination. Moral culture, artistic culture, intellectual culture, the biosphere, and so on each retain their proper integrity, yet find their ultimate meaning within this overarching Christocentric horizon. At each of its levels, the world becomes, in its own measure, a reflection of divine grandeur, ordered to Christ.22
What, then, is an example of a worldview that competes—often quite vigorously—with this integrally Catholic vision? Arguably, it is the technological worldview: a way of seeing in which the mastery and possession of nature become the primary ontology of the world. It would be too simple to claim that this is the only worldview operative in our time; yet it is at least plausible to say that it is the dominant one. One telling sign can be found in the academy itself—a kind of canary in the coal mine. Among the disciplines that attract the largest numbers of students and thus receive the greatest institutional weight, the technological and engineering fields (to which the medical sciences might be added23) increasingly take precedence over the so-called “pure” sciences and mathematics. The teleological weight of our world is thus inclined toward mastery and control. We might even say that science itself is increasingly oriented in this direction, in a way quite distinct from the more ancient conception of speculative science that provided the historical and institutional substrate from which modern science originally emerged. What was once ordered primarily toward understanding now tends to be ordered, more immediately, toward power over what is understood.
I am not among those pessimistic enough about the modern world to claim that a single, totalizing outlook exhausts the mindset of “modern man” (whoever that composite figure might be). Nonetheless, it is at least plausible to say that our culture is tempted toward a fusion of nature and art (technē), such that nature itself comes to appear as a reservoir of endless plasticity—of sheer possibility to be redesigned, optimized, and managed through ever more refined technical capacities. This orientation is operative not only through the physical sciences, but also through the social sciences, as mediated by technocratic legal, bureaucratic, and cultural structures. This, I take it, is the logic of technology: a worldview in which nature and art are no longer clearly distinguished, but are drawn into a single field of fabrication and control.
This diagnosis is captured with particular clarity by George Grant:
Why that foldedness towards potentialities of new makings has been implicit in modern science since its origins is extremely difficult to understand, and indeed has not yet been understood. That it has been so folded is expounded with consummate clarity in such writings as those of Bacon and Descartes, as they distinguished modern science from ancient science at the time of its very beginnings. The difficulty of understanding how and why it is so folded need not lead us to doubt that the folding is a fact. It is that fact which is given us in the neologism “technology,” and the novelty of that tact declares correct the characterization of our society as technological. There may indeed be some other more perfect word to characterize our civilization—some word which will come out of the understanding of what was being revealed when the European peoples brought forth those new sciences and arts. In the mean-time, the word “technological” catches best the uniqueness of our civilization at its surface, and indicates the cause of its worldwide appeal…
The desire for “mastery of ourselves” which generally means the mastery of other people results in the proliferation of new arts and sciences directed towards human control, so that others we can be shaped to live consonantly with the demands of mass society. These can be seen applied through the computerized bureaucracies of the private and public corporations, through mass education, medicine and the media etc. Many scientists are now, above all, planners and central members of the ruling class. The proliferating power of the medical profession illustrates our drive to new technologies of human nature…
We have bought a package deal of far more fundamental novelness than simply a set of instruments under our control. It is a destiny which enfolds us in its own conceptions of instrumentality, neutrality and purposiveness. It is in this sense that it has been truthfully said: technology is the ontology of the age. Western peoples (and perhaps soon all peoples) take themselves as subjects confronting otherness as objects —objects lying as raw material at the disposal of knowing and making subjects. Unless we comprehend the package deal we obscure from ourselves the central difficulty in our present destiny: we apprehend our destiny by forms of thought which are themselves the very core of that destiny… The account of existence which arises from the modern co-penetration of knowing and making exalts the possible above what is.24
It is often tempting, in the face of these developments, to issue a reactionary manifesto against our technical or technological society. I am not in the business of such manifestos. More to the point, a posture of techno-fatalism—of treating the trajectory of technology as irresistible destiny—seems to me a non-starter. We are indeed confronted with an unfolding logic of technology that must be rightly ordered, lest we find ourselves mastered by the tools of our own making. Yet artcraft, in all its forms and creativity, remains a genuine human good and achievement. Art—and even the technological application of practical intelligence in the service of scientific inquiry—belongs to the authentic exercise of human reason. These are part of the human task of building a genuinely human world within history: learning, at once, how to dwell within the givenness of nature and how to carry forward the civilizational impulse that leads us beyond mere givenness without abolishing it.
What is needed, then, is a reframing—and, where necessary, a replacement—of a worldview that has been wrongly situated within the order of values. Art and technology must be placed in their proper place within the hierarchy of natural and human goods, so that they function as particular “worlds” within the broader world—or worlds—that they are meant to serve. This is another way of saying that they must be situated within a fuller anthropology: one that acknowledges the limits of the human condition, the moral and interpersonal goods of human life lived together both synchronically and across generations, and, above all, the world of Redemption, the overarching reality that is “the whole Christ.” If anything stands at the core of the revealed faith, it is the eternal communion to which we are called in God. In this light, the central meaning of human life is presence: a reality of interpersonal communion at every level of intimacy—with the Triune God, with one another, and with creation itself.
This is another way of restating a well-known observation of Josef Pieper: leisure is the basis of culture. Or, as I like to put it, leisure is the basis of everything. From this perspective, everything finds its proper place. Artcraft can serve as an instrument in the building of a culture of personal presence, and it can itself be a source of such presence insofar as it realizes genuine human goods. The activity of artcraft is, after all, a distant reflection of the creativity of God.25 But art must be situated within the wider context of the other worlds that give it its proper scope: the world of Redemption; the moral world; the world of intellectual culture; the biosphere; the geosphere; and so forth.
In saying that “presence”—divine, human, and embodied—is the true context of the world, I mean that power is subordinate to truth, and that making and doing are themselves subordinate to contemplation. In this, I am not saying anything especially new; many others have made the same observation before me. And as is doubtless obvious to anyone who came hoping for a practical manifesto, I am not offering a programmatic solution to the challenges posed by our technological society, however urgently they call for right ordering.
What I do hope, however, is that I have offered some metaphysical tools—ways of seeing—that can assist you in ordering the questions you will face throughout your lives concerning the scale and meaning of human being and human action.
The reader will recognize the language of the scholastic theories of the so-called transcendental, “one,” that is found in every case of being. For an account most closely cohering to my own, see Thomists like F.-X. Maquart, Austin Woodbury, Jacques Maritain, Joseph Gredt, et al.↩︎
These remarks, which have a kind of currency in our contemporary political environment, are primarily being expressed from the perspective of Pierre Manent’s observations on political form, regimes, and the present vices of Europe. See Pierre Manent, A World Beyond Politics? A Defense of the Nation-State, trans. Marc A. LePain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013); Democracy Without Nations? The Fate of Self Government in Europe, trans. Paul Seaton (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2007).↩︎
Ambroise Gardeil, The True Christian Life, trans. Matthew K. Minerd (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2023), 55. And one can go farther still, to the very edges of the desire to enter into communion (through knowledge and love) with such a God precisely as He is, in the depths of His mystery—yet always recognizing that we cannot begin to imagine the hidden riches of this Source of all that is, nor dare to hope that a union a gift could be possible by human powers alone. The reader will here recognize the famous question concerning the “natural desire to see God.” For a position closest to my own, see Jean-Hervé Nicolas, Dieu connu comme inconnu (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1966), 185–236. For full context, see also the sources from Gardeil and Garrigou-Lagrange cited by Nicolas in this chapter.↩︎
See Jacques Maritain, “The Philosophy of the Organism: Notes on the Function of Nutrition,” Nova et Vetera, English Edition 19, no. 2 (Winter, 2021): 633–651; Michael D. Torre, “Yves R. Simon, Disciple of Maritain: The Idea of Fact and the Difference Between Science and Philosophy,” in Facts are Stubborn Things: Thomistic Perspectives in the Philosophies of Nature and Science, ed. Matthew K. Minerd (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press and the American Maritain Association, 2021), 19–39.↩︎
In distinction from planets wholly composed of gas.↩︎
Daniel D. De Haan, “Perception and the Vis cogitativa: A Thomistic Analysis of Aspectual, Actional, and Affectional Percepts,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 88, no. 3 (2014): 397–437; idem, “Moral Perception and the Function of the Vis cogitativa in Thomas Aquinas’s Doctrine of Antecedent and Consequent Passions,” Documenti e studi sulla tradizione filosofica medievale 25 (2014): 289–330. For an excellent overview, see Julien Peghaire, “A Forgotten Sense: The Cogitative according to St. Thomas Aquinas,” The Modern Schoolman 20 (1943): 123–40, 210–29; and George Klubertanz, The Discursive Power: Sources and Doctrine of the Vis cogitativa According to St. Thomas Aquinas (St. Louis: The Modern Schoolman, 1952).↩︎
See Yves R. Simon, “An Essay on Sensation,” in Philosopher at Work, ed. Anthony O. Simon (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), 57–109; Simon Introduction to Metaphysics of Knowledge, 1-38; John N. Deely, “The Immateriality of the Intentional as Such,” The New Scholasticism 42 (1968): 293-306. This topic generated significant scholarly debate in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, a debate largely cut off from later Dominican-Thomistic developments. For example, Eleonore Stump does not take the same perspective as that argued for here; see Eleonore Stump, Aquinas (London: Routledge, 2003), 253–54, esp. 253: “The spiritual reception of sensible species is a change in the matter of the bodily organ of the sense.” One finds similar remarks—often in a more strongly reductionistic vein—in Robert Pasnau, Theories of Cognition in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 1–60. For surveys of this discussion, see S. M. Cohen, “St. Thomas Aquinas on the Immaterial Reception of Sensible Forms,” The Philosophical Review 91 (1982): 193–209; John J. Haldane, “Aquinas on Sense-Perception,” The Philosophical Review 92 (1983): 233–39; Paul Hoffman, “St. Thomas Aquinas on the Halfway State of Sensible Being,” The Philosophical Review 99 (1990): 73–92; and Gabriele De Anna, “Aquinas on Sensible Forms and Semimaterialism,” The Review of Metaphysics 54 (2000): 43–63. A recent article of interest—though not aligned with the interpretation advanced here, and grounded rather in later scholastic disputes—is James D. Madden, “Is a Thomistic Theory of Intentionality Consistent with Physicalism?,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 91, no. 1 (Winter 2017): 1–28.↩︎
The present talk is being written out in order to begin sketching the particular content for one or two different chapters in a book project that I have been working on. In that work, I will have a particular chapter dedicated very specifically to the crucial cognition, preliminaries that discuss this unique “objective” reception of forms. For the time being, the citations and discussion in note 7 above should provide a beginning point for the interested reader. On these points, developed Aristotelian epistemology differs immensely from the framing familiar to the accounts that descend from the late-medieval and modern periods of epistemological reflection.↩︎
See Anton Pegis, At the Origins of the Thomistic Notion of Man (New York: MacMillan, 1963);↩︎
For interesting reflections on the latter, see Leon Kass, The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of Our Nature (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1999).↩︎
Although most often associated with Teilhard de Chardin, the term “noosphere” also owes its coinage to the Russian geochemist Vladimir Vernadsky who was one of the figures involved in the development and popularization of the term “biosphere.” Although my presentation of this notion is being developed in a particular, Thomist line of thought, nonetheless, the reader can consult the following works for some introduction to the notion and explorations of its implications for understanding the unified “mind world” that is possible because of the particular phenomenon of human knowledge and volition, see Paul R. Sampson and David Pit (eds.), The Biosphere and Noosphere Reader (Oxford: Routledge, 1998).↩︎
In addition to Deely, this is also at the heart of the proposals made by Nathan Lyons in Signs in the Dust: A Theory of Natural Culture and Cultural Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). It is also at the core of the particular evolutionary thought of Teilhard de Chardin cited above. Viewed within the context of specifically Thomistic thought, my own position is well intimated by the following observations in Serge-Thomas Bonino, Dieu, Alpha et Omega Création et Providence (Paris: Parole et Silence, 2023), ch. 8: “Once this leap has been made, culture—the fruit of the interaction between nature and human spirituality—becomes a decisive factor in human evolution. The history of the human species is no longer governed by biological determinism alone.”↩︎
Much of what I say in this section is truncated, as it will be developed in greater detail in a variety of chapters in the book in which this lecture’s content is develop developed at much greater length. It was already the subject of some reflection in Matthew K. Minerd, “Beyond Non-Being: Thomistic Metaphysics on Second Intentions, Ens morale, and Ens artificiale,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 91, no. 3 (July, 2017): 353–379.↩︎
See Jacques Maritain, “Language and the Theory of Sign,” in Frontiers in Semiotics, ed. John Deely, Brooke Williams, and Felicia E. Kruse (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1986), 51–62.↩︎
For the purposes of this paper, I am being somewhat loose in the logical distinction between subject and object within a given discourse.↩︎
The scientific art of logic is of pivotal importance for the stable development of this domain of noetic being. The reader should be aware, also, that it is possible that speculation can be undertaken regarding so-called “practical” matters as well. To denominate this kind of speculative reflection upon realities that ultimately bear upon human action, certain later scholastics referred to this mode of human cognition as being “speculatively practical” that is, concerning knowledge that is ultimately ordered to the directing of human act (either morally or “artistically”) but here considered in a way that attempts to articulate the definitional and principial structure of that given domain of knowledge. The classic example of this sort of knowledge is moral philosophy.↩︎
The topic of ens morale represents an interesting development in later scholasticism, though never quite fully carried through to its full implications.↩︎
On the fundamental ambiguity of history, as well as the possible of “world-significance” in “history-making” events, I agree with the observations made in Maritain, On the Philosophy of History, ed. Joseph W. Evans (New York: Scribners, 1957), 43–68. For some helpful indications concerning a relationship between natural law and political rationality in particular, see Jean-Rémi, Lanavère, Loi naturelle et poliiqtue chez saint Thomas d’Aquin (Paris; Vrin, 2024), esp. 187–288. Concerning the way that knowledge of the natural law is subject to historical variability, see Jacques Maritain, On the Philosophy of History, 104–111; as well as the closing chapters of Loi naturelle ou loi non-écrite, Raïssa’s Abraham and the Ascent of Conscience, and the brief discussion of the moral law in situations in of degradation discussed in passing in Man and the State. Finally, concerning the notion of ius gentium as a kind of shared, inchoate space of “moral science” within a broad public, often trans-national, see Matthew K. Minerd, Ius Gentium as Publicly Articulated Moral Science,” Nova et Vetera, English Edition 21, no. 3 (Summer 2023): 1043–1058.↩︎
The reader will here note the Thomist account of the properties of integritas, consonantia, and claritas that belong beauty.↩︎
On this topic, see the important remarks of Jacques Maritain in Art and Scholasticism, ch. 9, especially concerning the distinction between artistic and conceptual knowledge. Artistic intelligence is ordered primarily to the shaping of what is to be made. The distinction between concept and exemplar (or, in traditional scholastic parlance, the idea—a term often conflated with conceptus from the sixteenth century onward) is pivotal for preserving the proper character of technical–artistic knowledge and for avoiding its reduction to the contours of speculative cognition. It is for this reason that I have certain reservations about the account of art presented by Daniel McInerny in Beauty and Imitation: A Philosophical Reflection on the Arts (Elk Grove: Word on Fire Academic, 2024). His treatment tends to situate art primarily within the restricted domain of the fine arts—which, while undeniably important, constitute only a small portion of human artcraft—and to assign to art functions that verge toward speculative contemplation and the articulation of moral narrative.
The more fundamental difference between McInerny’s approach and the one I adopt concerns the nature of practico-artistic intellection and the meaning of “imitation.” In addition to Art and Scholasticism, my account is especially indebted to Jacques Maritain’s Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry and The Situation of Poetry, as well as to Marie-Dominique Philippe’s L’activité artistique: Philosophie du faire, 2 vols. (Paris: Beauchesne, 1969–70). For discussions of artistic experience, contemplation, and creativity, see Philippe, vol. 2, 225–356; on the distinction between art and prudence, vol. 1, 27–38 and 315–320; on the maxim ars imitatur naturam, vol. 2, 301; and on the distinction between concept and idea, vol. 2, 321–331.
All of these accounts, however, tend to give insufficient attention to the “non-fine” or “non-liberal” arts, and they engage the question of technology as a distinctive modern phenomenon only indirectly and non-thematically. This lacuna likely reflects the lingering influence of nineteenth-century idealist aesthetics, which construes philosophy of art primarily as a theory of beauty. Philippe himself clearly recognized the foreshortening involved in this move and, as the very title of his two-volume work indicates, sought instead to articulate a genuine philosophy of making. His diagnostic remarks on this point remain especially pertinent (see “Situation de la philosophie de l’art dans la philosophie aristotélico-thomiste,” Studia philosophica 13 [1953]: 99–112):
↩︎This is why if there is, indeed, a philosophy of art, and if we must maintain this special part of philosophy, we must not forget that this philosophy, precisely because of the practical character of the “factibile,” must be divided and distinguish in order to try to grasp the proper note of every human “factibile”—from that of poetry to the art of cooking and agriculture, one could say!... But within this diversity, we must emphasize the specific order that remains and the various hierarchies that we can establish.
Thus, we see that this philosophy of art is not a small, optional, and secondary treatise, a little luxury, as philosophers are all too ready to consider it to be. It is essential to any philosophy of man deserving of the name, which precisely because of its human breadth presents us a full grasp of human activities and shows us their intimate connections. It is only through the philosophy of art that we can have a perfect knowledge of the “factibile.” This philosophy must enable us:
1˚ to appreciate all the originality of artistic activity, considered in the full amplitude of fabricative human activity;
2˚ to judge concerning the special attraction exercised upon man by such an activity and to understand its seductive power, by seeing how such an activity is a good that is connatural to man, considered as “homo faber,” whose intellect is conditioned by the fact that this soul is the form of a body, depending upon sensate activities in its exercise and development;
3˚ to evaluate, at once, the power and dangers proper to such an activity, by specifying how it is not the first and proper good of man (i.e., that homo faber is not man considered in his totality as man);
4˚ finally, to understand how such an activity, if it comes to take root in human life such that it manages to polarize and to grasp all its living forces, leads man not only to terrible isolation, separating him from other more profoundly human goods which alone are ultimately capable of bringing him to full flourishing, but must necessarily dominate him, tyrannizing him, striving to make him into an “artificial product,” in order to exploit him as though his own meaning were wholly within the domain of fabrication. It falls to the philosophy of art to show us the “why” of this greatness of the “factibile,” of its seductive power and its organized tyranny (which seems so liberal on the surface) if we let it become the supreme master. Thus, if we deliberately refuse to undertake such philosophical reflection, we have made our choice: the whole of human activities, even considered communally, will need to remain unexplored and unintelligible.
Let us add that even for the life of a Christian, precisely as Christian, such a philosophy has a role to play, for it enables us to better understand how the divine Christian life lays, as it were, beyond this distinction between the “agibile” and the “factibile,” or more precisely, how it eminently takes up the various perfections of the “agibile” and the “factibile.” Does not our Christian life have two aspects: to make us live a life that shared with Christ and that is modeled upon Him? It involves both union with, and the imitation of, Christ. At once, it asks us to love God and to love our neighbor, to live alone and in community, to build up this community, to fill a role and function in it. This community will flower forth in a liturgy, which will take up all that we call liturgical art, a liturgy which must be, as it were, the proper environment of inspiration, from which an entire Christian art will blossom forth. Indeed, let us not forget that, in addition to the gifts of the Holy Spirit, which are exercised in an invisible way, there are the “charisms” which enable the members of Christ to have a visible effectiveness on one another through deeds, words, and activities.
Obviously, the philosophy of art will not deal explicitly with all these problems, but it will enable spiritual theology to study them more deeply by means of certain notions which such a philosophy can provide.
In particular in our own days, the philosophy of art is useful for enabling us to more fully grasp contemporary philosophical tendencies. These various phenomenological and existentialist (even, in a way, Marxist ) philosophies are, in fact, philosophies where man holds a primordial and capital place. In these philosophies, everything ultimately seems to be brought back to a kind of philosophy of man, and we can even affirm that everything seems, in a way, to be brought back to a very advanced psychological study of the “factibile” in its various modalities. This fact can easily be explained as soon as we note, on the one hand, that final causality is no longer recognized as it should be, and, on the other hand, that the subjective and psychological aspect of things tends to invade everything. From Descartes onward, with the rejection of final causality and the fusion of the psychological and metaphysical perspectives, we are witnessing this extraordinary and monstrous grip being exercised by the “factibile.” Only a just and exact philosophical conception of the “factibile,” which knows how to appreciate its greatness and its limits, can understand what is right and what is wrong in such philosophical conceptions.
We must never forget the fact that criticism, if it wishes to be effective, must always place itself on the same level as its adversary, so that it may know both the portion of truth that he does indeed affirm, as well as all of his errors. It is through the philosophy of art that we can best grasp what is legitimate and what is untenable in any idealistic philosophy, as much in that of someone like Plato as in that of someone like Descartes or Hegel, since all idealism seems to imply a kind of artistic and aesthetic position, to which it accords an absolute, metaphysical value. In all idealism, there is a kind of exaltation of formal causality (intrinsic formal causality, and often also exemplary formal causality) to the detriment of final causality.
Given the existence of these idealist aesthetics which present themselves as being sciences of the beautiful, we must, as a critical introduction to the philosophy of art, specify the analogical nature of the beautiful, and show that the philosophy of art does not deal with the beauty as such in its full analogical scope, but rather, with a particular kind of beauty. Only the metaphysics can study and analyze beauty in in all of its analogical perfection. As regards the beautiful, we must make discernments and register criticisms analogous to those that Aristotle took care to specify as regards the good, as it was understood in Plato’s philosophy. Indeed, in the Nicomachean Ethics, the Philosopher shows that ethics does not consider the “good in itself,” the absolute good, but instead, the human good, the good that belongs to the “agibile.” In the same way, we must show that the philosophy of art must reflect on “human beauty,” the beautiful as relative to the “factibile,” either as its ultimate goal, sought out by itself (beauty in the fine arts), or as its mode (beauty in techniques), or as its first natural foundation (the beauty of nature). Precisely because of these critical discernments that we must form in the face of idealist philosophies, we believe that it is preferable not to speak of “aesthetics” but of “the philosophy of art.” This will enable us to immediately put the accent on the “factibile,” on the “doing,” which expresses the practical character of this philosophy and removes the equivocation caused by the term “aesthetics,” which calls to mind a single science specified by the beautiful precisely as such.
Thus, indeed more than ever, the importance of the philosophy of art is undeniable. However, let us also recognize its difficulty. It calls for, at once, philosophical and artistic capacities, and this is why it cannot be constructed in full perfection without the contribution of philosophers and artists. And this kind of collaboration is a delicate affair, for the philosopher must have the humility to entreat artists not only for the material needed for his philosophical reflection, but also for the facts that will serve in forming the proper principles of his philosophical reflection. Moreover, for their part, the artists involved in this task must accept the fact that philosophers must enlighten these facts, that they illuminate them with the light of philosophy so that they might emerge in all their own, proper intelligibility. This collaboration only be possible if the philosopher is already a bit of an artist and if the artist is also a bit of a philosopher. Otherwise, they will compete with each other without any mutual understanding.
On the other hand, let us recognize that Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy has done far too little work in the domain of the philosophy of art. Some have finally begun to worry about this state of affairs —and none too soon! Idealist philosophers have heretofore been allowed to engage in the task of building grand aesthetic syntheses, while realists have remained content with critiquing them, without however constructing authentic philosophies of art. Undoubtedly this deficiency comes from the fact that Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophy has been harnessed above all by theologians, who were interested in theological morals but did not spend time reflecting on art. Therefore, such a lacuna must be remedied.
See note 12 above. And one should note that this reality of culture is something like the natural “insertion point” for the mystery of salvation history and the shared communion that is had in the Church, the mystical body of Christ.↩︎
I am here influenced by the Christocentrism of the Salmanticenses as found in Journet (and also exposited well by Fr. Dylan Schrader), as well as the particular form that it takes in spiritual authors such as Bl. Columba Marmion and Charles Louis Gay. Indirectly, I am influenced by the 20th and 21st century attempts to read a kind of cosmic scope to Christology in the thought of St. Maximos the Confessor (e.g., Von Balthasar, Jordan Wood, et al.).↩︎
This orientation toward mastery is already explicit in early modernity, most famously in René Descartes’ programmatic remarks at the close of the Discourse on Method, where the new sciences are ordered toward rendering us “masters and possessors of nature.” With Hans Jonas, one may distinguish two moments in the history of modern technoscience, which come to full convergence only in the nineteenth century; nevertheless, in the cultural revolutions associated with figures such as Bacon and Descartes, the logic of technoscience is already present in proximate potency, awaiting later actualization. See Hans Jonas, “Seventeenth Century and After: The Meaning of the Scientific and Technological Revolution,” in Philosophical Essays: From Ancient Creed to Technological Man (New York: Atropos Press, 2010), 46–82, esp. 72ff.
A telling example of the slurring of the classical views of nature and art are already present in Hobbes, whose rhetorical flourishes make the opening words of the Leviathan almost easy to overlook:
↩︎Nature (the art whereby God hath made and governes the world) is by the art of man, as in many other things, so in this also imitated, that it can make an Artificial Animal. For seeing life is but a motion of Limbs, the begining whereof is in some principall part within; why may we not say, that all Automata (Engines that move themselves by springs and wheeles as doth a watch) have an artificiall life? For what is the Heart, but a Spring; and the Nerves, but so many Strings; and the Joynts, but so many Wheeles, giving motion to the whole Body, such as was intended by the Artificer? Art goes yet further, imitating that Rationall and most excellent worke of Nature, Man. For by Art is created that great LEVIATHAN called a COMMON-WEALTH, or STATE, (in latine CIVITAS) which is but an Artificiall Man; though of greater stature and strength than the Natural, for whose protection and defence it was intended (https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/3207/pg3207.txt).
George Grant, “Thinking about Technology,” in Technology and Justice (Concord, Ontario: Anansi, 1986), 11–34 (here, 14, 16, and 32). Also see Harmut Rosa, The Uncontrollability of the World, trans. James C. Wagner (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2020); Michael Hanby, “Toward a More Perfect Absolutism,” First Things (October 2016) https://www.firstthings.com/article/2016/10/a-more-perfect-absolutism. One can also sense something like aspects of the Heideggerian critiques of technology in what I have said, although I am only indirectly indebted to his thought. For a clear summary of his thought, see Peter-Paul Verbeek, What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, and Design (University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 2005), 47–95. Verbeek’s treatment of the mediating role of technology should be supplemented by the various studies in Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (Oxford: Routledge, 2004).↩︎
This is well summarized by Philippe, L’activité Artistique, vol. 1 (cf. p. 285–290 and 346–356):
Quite clearly the word “creation,” taken in its proper sense is not suitable for describing human artistic activity, for “to create” is to make something from nothing. However, on the other hand, to the degree that the artist transfigures nature, he does truly give it a new state, a new appearance and way of presenting itself. Therefore, he brings about a kind of transposition. His activity is free in relation to physical reality and, thus, in this sense is a kind of creation. It is an imitation in that it presupposes a natural environment within which it draws out its own proper characteristics. However, this imitation is a transposition; indeed, it is, to repeat Aristotle’s very exact and evocative expression, the “creation of an imitation.” Therefore, we need not choose between “creation” and “imitation,” but instead must understand how artistic activity imitates by creating and creates by imitating
One might also think, of course, of Tolkien’s treatment of sub-creation in his essay “Leaf by Niggle.”↩︎
