Metaphysics as Mediating Dialogue by Oliva Blanchette (review)

Reviewed by: Metaphysics as Mediating Dialogue by Oliva Blanchette Matthew Minerd BLANCHETTE, Oliva. Metaphysics as Mediating Dialogue. Washington, D. C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2023. xi + 133 pp. Cloth, 75. 00 In this text, the author presents a personal synthesis of metaphysics using a lexicon of scholastic and Blondelian-Hegelian thought. The first chapter, "From Questions of Being to the Question of Being as Being, " presents a quasi-phenomenological account of the emergence of the analogical conception of order of various degrees of perfection of being as such, concretized in various domains that are physical/natural and human/cultural. In this first chapter, an important theme that emerges and becomes a golden thread throughout the text is the claim that the primary analogate of being is, within our experience, the human person and the human mode of activity in culture and religion. End Page 538 The second chapter, "Metaphysics as Mediating Dialogue of the Crossroads of Intersubjective, Intercultural, and Interreligious Communication, " is perhaps the densest, covering a number of points handled in the remainder of the book. In this chapter, Blanchette is concerned with showing how intercommunication takes place within discourse concerning both the shared principles of intelligent agents and ultimately in view of an orientation toward what he later will call the vertical transcendence of culture in relation to God. Both of these tasks are of critical importance for constituting the necessary background for a philosophy of culture and a philosophy of religion that can mediate among the various actualities of human existence amid the objective and subjective aspects of art, science, and moral mutual recognition of intelligent agents in community. The third chapter, "The Necessity of Metaphysics in the Struggle for World Peace and Justice, " opens with an arguably theological observation that the rational agent has two ends, one of which is not attainable in this life involving some kind of "more direct relation with God" in the hereafter, and the other pertaining to the struggle toward the establishment of a "historical communal peace. " The framework for this terminology is a scholastically aware engagement with Blondelian (and partly Hegelian) thought. This chapter is concerned with articulating the way that rational agents engage in the historical task of establishing a kind of universal spirit of intersubjective recognition, at least as an asymptotic goal within history, even if contention ultimately prevents the formation of such a single, unified, intrahistorical community. Blanchette argues that this project is possible only within the dual transcendence of the human person, namely, as cultural and as religious, the latter being the condition for the former. Metaphysics has the role of articulating such transcendence. The fourth chapter, "Metaphysics as the Way from Phenomenology to Theology, " engages with some of the questions related to the "theological turn" in Continental phenomenology. Phenomenological inquiry, Blanchette argues, must acknowledge that it investigates only one order of being in the universe, the human-intentional (or "historico-social"), and therefore stands in need of metaphysics to mediate its subject material with other kinds of being (as is true, similarly, of other disciplines). However, he also contends that phenomenology offers a very important preamble for a "first-person ontology" that is sensitive to the specific cultural and historical being of spiritual beings, but ultimately, Blanchette argues, it does so as "part of the way up from the bottom" and as opening up to metaphysical speculation, which itself prevents theology from degenerating into a kind of superstition. In chapters 5 through 7, Blanchette traces out the kind of mediation that occurs between metaphysics and theology. In chapter 5, he briefly develops his stated conviction regarding the human person's role as primary analogate in metaphysics and connects to a more Aristotelian End Page 539 language of a transcendent cause that is pure act, though also immanent creatively and, upon theological supposition, through divine incarnation. The reviewer found chapter 6, "Metaphysics and the Transcendence of Cultures in Religion, " to be the most interesting. In it, Blanchette develops earlier themes concerning the metaphysics of culture and its relationship to nature, as well as the constitution of subjectivity precisely as intersubjectivity among rational selves in the order of culture. Developing themes from chapter 3, he. . .