Sunday, April 12, 2009

And one from Bryan ...

... Unintended Consequences.

This reminded me of something from Josef Pieper's The Silence of St. Thomas:
... with the common modern objection, as it has been repeatedly formulated from Bacon to Kant, "that truth can be predicated not of what really exists but, in the strict and proper sense, only of what is thought," St. Thomas would to a large extent agree. He would reply that this is quite to the point. Only what is thought can be called in the strict sense "true," but real things are something thought! It is essential to their nature (he would continue), that they are thought. They are real precisely because they are thought. To put it more explicitly, they are real because they are thought creatively, that is, they have been fashioned by thought. The essence of things is that they are creatively thought. This is to be taken literally and not in a figurative sense. Further, because things are themselves thoughts and have the "character of a word" (as Guardini says), they may be called - in a quite precise and legitimate usage of the term - "true," in the same way as one ordinarily calls true thoughts and what is thought.

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