Towards an ontology of finitude: Suárez and Hegel on the sameness of being and being determinate

FERREIRO, HÉCTOR

Padua

Workshop; International Workshop "Il concetto di filosofia in Hegel tra logica e filosofia pratica"; 2022

Università degli Studi di Padova

The way Suárez understands the relation between being and essence, that is, in other words, between actual being and determinacy, is thus not similar to the way Kant understands it, but rather with the way Hegel does it. Indeed, Hegel rejects Kant´s claim that existence and determinacy are as such different, so that their unity is a synthesis given to the subject through a specific cognitive act, namely perception. In the latter paradigm, perception has to have the property of putting the knowing subject in contact with the real world as the general realm of actually existing essences. For Hegel, on the contrary, as it was in the last analysis the case for Suárez too, the contents of the representations of the knowing subject become themselves the actually existing things, precisely because the knowing subject entirely determines the determinacy of those contents. This is the reason why Hegel´s positively reappropriates the ontological argument. The central claim of the ontological argument is in fact that it is in certain cases legitimate to derive actual existence from mental concepts. Hegel defends a sui generis version of the ontological argument: what is deduced in a valid existential inference is, strictly speaking, the singular determinate content of a concept; existence is nothing but a merely mental consideration on that content. The ultimate condition of possibility of the deduction of existence from the determinate content of the concepts of the human mind is that existence is analytically contained in those contents. When, on the contrary, ?reality? (realitas, Realität) is abstractly dissociated from ?being? (esse, Dasein, Wirklichkeit), the actually existing thing is construed as the result of the unification of reality and being, either as a unity in which being is conceived of as a proper determination that that reality or essence previously lacked and now is added to it in its own essential entity ?this is the thesis of Scotus, Wolff and Baumgarten? or as a synthesis in which reality is as such only possible and being, conceived of as radically different from reality, posits its already entirely determinate essential entity in an absolute way ?this is the thesis of Aquinas and, in the last analysis and with the due modifications, also Kant´s thesis. Hegel ?who can be considered in this respect as supporting in practice Suárez´ distinctio rationis between essence and being? claims that the difference between the determinacy of the actually existing thing and its existence results from a mere consideration of the human mind on the actually existing, determinate thing. For both Suárez and Hegel, that which actually exists is always something determinate in which its actual existence is not added to its determinacy in order to complement it neither it is synthetized with it in order to posit it, but it is rather a unity in which both terms, being and determinacy, are mere aspects of one and the same being-determinate (Dasein).