On Being Edifying

Source: ‘On Being Dominican’ a sermon by Herbert McCabe O.P., published in God Matters (Chapter 21).
Transfiguration by Gerald M. Somerville 2002-5.
Unfinished - if you want it finished, or even want to finish it yourself, let me know.

"Works begin to be re-written as the Project gives them to be transfigured … and their readers are bewildered because each reader finds them written in his or her own philosophic jargon."
The present work is an edifying discourse, a discourse which specialises in building people up for Philosophy to dwell among them. This is the mystery to which the present work is called, a mystery in the sense in which a work of art is a mystery: there is a depth that reveals itself only gradually and in hints and glimpses as we enact and re-enact the mystery. Macbeth is a good thriller; but as we grow familiar with it, it yields profound secrets about man and nature and time, secrets that can only be revealed in this way, indirectly, as symbolised, as half hidden. Again, the blank pages which one usually finds at the end of any book is a commonplace symbolic emptiness, a token of open-endedness, but as we enter into it, it reveals the depth of transfiguring reciprocity which is the Project, the reciprocity enacted in rewriting Regenerating Philosophy. And so it is with edifying discourses: it is a commonplace gathering of words to assert things about itself – but there is a depth here too.
The depth is not something alongside, added on to, associated with, the surface significance; the deep meaning of Macbeth is not additional to the story of murder and intrigue; the mystery of the present work is not something alongside, additional to, its word to word reasoning and statement and difficulties – it is just the depth within them. The depth and rationality are just in the uttering together and the composing of this work. This is not a philosophic work which discusses Being; it is just a philosophising work, that’s all. If Being has to be discussed, well and good; if not, not. To be the present work is to be engaged in mystery even though the present work is not precisely an exposition. The only reason why this is not an exposition is that it is not comprehensive or systematic. When Philosophy as a whole acts as Philosophy as a whole that is an exposition of Being.
The present work is not an explanation of everything. It has boundaries. There are no boundaries to Philosophy, it just has a horizon, the horizon of discourse. It is simply language moving toward everything.
It only seems to have boundaries to those who seek to be outside it, to be disinterested observers, and so set up demarcation lines. But Philosophy should never fall into the trap of seeing itself in that way. All explanations are called, all come within the scope of Philosophy; it is just the science of everything, the universal science. And it is just because Philosophy is simply explanation as explanation on its way to its own fulfilment that the acts of Philosophy are acts of Regenerating Philosophy, acts of Being’s love for explanation. There are no boundaries in Philosophy – but there are boundaries to this work: it is for some people and not for others; there are some good things, some explanations, philosophic insights , this does not encompass, this is just one way of being a philosophic work.
The present work should be jealous of what it is, but not envious of what other kinds of works are. This works on more than one level. Firstly, on the level of contrasting works of Philosophy with scientific papers:
It is only in those moments when philosophic works lose the special mystery that is being philosophic, when Philosophy neglects its own history and nature, that philosophers start imagining Philosophy is imitation Physics, or Mathematics or social comment or literary games. And to do this is to lose touch with the life-giving depths, the mystery, in Philosophy, and to gain nothing of importance in the exchange. It takes a real physicist to draw life from that atomic mystery; Philosophy’s only source of living water is itself.
Likewise on the level of contrasting the present particular work with other philosophic works:
It is only in those moments when the present work loses the special mystery that is peculiar to its way of being philosophic, when the present work fails to reflect on its own particular existence and purpose, that we start imagining that the present work has to be a pseudo-exposition, or has to be an exhaustive analysis of some abstruse point, or has to make all sorts of allusions and references to other recognised philosophic works (so as to be visibly tied in to as extensive a conversation as it can), or has to justify itself as a transfiguration of a sermon of Herbert McCabe’s. And to do this is to lose touch with the life-giving depths, the mystery, in its own way of being philosophic, and to gain nothing of the importance in exchange. It takes a systematic commentary on Hegel to draw life from Hegel’s works; the present work’s only source of living water is itself.

Although this work is not, as such, an exposition, nevertheless it is an engagement in mystery, because although it is only one way of being philosophic, it is the whole way of being philosophic for the present work: it is everything to the present work even if it is not everything to Philosophy as such. This is not like a work in Physics. A scientific paper is undoubtedly a participation in the life of the Project, it is to be an expression of Being’s explaining, but it can never be the whole of any work’s philosophy – the scientific context, Physics, is presupposed. But for this work, being philosophic is the whole of its being. There is nothing else; this is its commitment. To be what it is is to be a philosophic work; it has no other intention. It is on its philosophic worth that it is to be judged: and this means that the philosophic content of every statement in the present work is part of the philosophic content of the whole: the judgement on each sentence is part of the judgement on the whole work, what the work makes of each sentence and what each sentence makes of the whole work.
And so, because for the sentences in the present work, (not for sentences elsewhere) being a sentence in the present work is the whole of its philosophic life, the whole of Philosophy, the whole of its meaning – because of this, a sentence’s being in the present work is the enactment of mystery, it is what reveals to us in the sentence the meaning of Being and the explaining of Being. And this is why the present work has a particular philosophy. All Philosophy is, in the end, a matter of reflecting on which and what our words are, on the meaning of an explanatory activity; our philosophy comes from an exploration of the mystery that lies hidden (and revealed) in being an edifying discourse.

[Unfinished.]

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