The Paradoxical Structure of Existence

173 Pages·2015·1.93 MB·English

by  Frederick D. Wilhelmsen

New material this edition copyright © 2015 by Transaction Publishers,
New Brunswick, New Jersey. Originally published in 1995 by Preserving
Christian Publications, Inc.
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Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2014040893
ISBN: 978-1-4128-5612-6
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wilhelmsen, Frederick D., author.
The paradoxical structure of existence / Frederick D. Wilhelmsen;
with a new introduction by James Lehrberger.
pages cm
Reprint of: Irving, Tex. : University of Dallas Press, 1970. Includes
index.
ISBN 978-1-4128-5612-6 (acid-free paper) 1. Ontology. I. Title.
BD331.W535 2015
111’.1--dc23
2014040893
Contents
Foreword vii
Introduction to the Transaction Edition ix
Introduction xxix
1 The History of Being in Western
Civilization: a Résumé 1
2 The Problematic of Existence: a Parenthesis on
Metaphysical Methodology 27
3 St. Thomas Aquinas and an Introduction to the
Metaphysics of Existence 33
4 Reasoning about Existence
A. Essence as Analysis and Existence as Synthesis 43
B. The Paradoxical Structure of Existence 53
5 The Domestication of the Nothing 65
6 Existence as a “Towards God” 79
7 The Human Person: Towards a Metaphysics of
the Future 89
8 Existence and History 101
9 The Philosopher and the Myth 125
Index 141

Foreword
In this third edition of my book I have had an opportunity not often
given authors of philosophical studies. I could and did ponder again
the reasoning which initially went into the writing of my treatise in
metaphysics. I could and did rectify where I deemed it necessary and
expand on original conclusions where I thought it advisable. I have lived
with this work through twenty years of teaching metaphysics, here at
the University of Dallas and in many years of summer teaching at the
Escorial in Spain. Withal, the book remains substantially what it was
when first published. Again I dedicate these reflections and the rea-
soning establishing them to all my students, wheresoever they may be.
Frederick D. Wilhelmsen
Professor of Philosophy and Politics
University of Dallas, Irving, Texas
vii

Introduction to the
Transaction Edition
James Lehrberger, O.Cist.
I
Three events drove Frederick D. Wilhelmsen to write The Paradoxical
Structure of Existence and they loom as large today as they did when
he first published this book in 1970. The first event was the crisis in
Western philosophy.1 Frederick Wilhelmsen (“Fritz” to his friends) saw
that the previous three hundred years had witnessed the triumph of a
philosophical view which at once was both theoretical and practical.
Drawing his understanding of this history with the broadest strokes,
he understood that the modern philosophers’ at first undermined and
then denied the intelligibility of existing beings. This made any attempt
to understand things in themselves an exercise in futility. The practi-
cal reflex of this theory was the determination to treat existing things
as merely raw material to be formed and shaped by human hands for
serving human purposes. This metaphysical and moral conviction
planted its roots in the Renaissance; its earliest growth sprang up
during the seventeenth century when Descartes envisioned clear and
distinct ideas as the key to making human beings the lords and masters
of nature; it steadily grew through the eighteenth century’s optimistic
belief that enlightened reason could bring about freedom and progress;
and it flowered to full maturity when the machine technology of the
nineteenth century’s industrial revolution brought Descartes’ dream
to full realization. Even the sharp divergences and differences within
this tradition—e.g., Locke versus Kant on knowledge—are variations
on its central theme. The belief that knowledge is for the sake of power
and progress, however, was undermined in the course of the twentieth
century by the bitter fruit it bore at Passchendaele, Auschwitz, the
Gulag, and Hiroshima: human beings had proved to be just one more
ix