Переводчик Андрей Викторович

As is well known, it was Rene Descartes who provided the philosophical basis of "classical" or pre-quantum physics by enunciating the distinction between res cogitans and res extensa. One generally perceives this Cartesian dichotomy as nothing more than the mind/body duality, forgetting that Descartes has not only distinguished between matter and mind, but has, at the same time, imposed a very peculiar and indeed problematic conception of the former element. He supposes, namely, that a res extensa is bereft of all sensible qualities, which obviously implies that it is imperceptible. The red apple which we do perceive must consequently be relegated to res cogitans; it has becOme a private phantasm, a mental as distinguished from a real entity. This postulate, moreover, demands another: one is now forced-on pain of radical subjectivism-to assume that the red apple, which is unreal, is causally related to a real apple, which however is not perceptible. What from a pre-Cartesian point of view was one object has now become two; as Whitehead puts it: "One is the conjecture, and the other is the dream."
This, in a nutshell, is the fateful "bifurcation" hypothesis which underlies and in a way determines the Weltanschauung of modern science. The first thing, perhaps, that needs to be pointed out is that this cartesian assumption can neither be proved by philosophical argument nor corroborated by scientific means. Whether it is indeed "tenable" is more difficult to say; however, bifurcation is in any case incompatible with the teachings of the traditional philosophic schools, not one of which has subjectivized the perceptual object in the manner of Descartes. According to the perennial consensus, we do "look out upon the world" in the act of perception, as every non-philosopher likewise believes; it is only that the world and the Reality are not exactly the same thing, which is however another question.
It is of interest to note that Whitehead attacks the idea of bifurcation on the ground that "Knowledge is ultimate."5 What he means by this assertion is that the act of knowing cannot in principle be explained by reducing it to some natural process. And this position is traditional: "knowing" does not reduce to "being"; the two poles CHIT and SAT are irreducible (and so is the third, the Vedantic ANANDA, which however does
not enter into our present considerations).

Each being, moreover, is endowed with a certain efficacy, a certain power to act outside itself, which likewise derives from its act-of-being, and thus from God. And yet that efficacy, that power, is distinctly its own. As Etienne Gilson has beautifully explained: "The universe, as represented by St. Thomas, is not a mass of inert bodies passively moved by a force which passes through them, but a collection of active beings each enjoying an efficacy delegated to it by God along with actual being. At the first beginning of a world like this, we have to place not so much a force being exercised as an infinite goodness communicated. Love is the unfathomable source of all causality.
We are beginning, perhaps, to catch a glimpse of the Thomistic ontology; but let us continue. Not only is God's love the unfathomable source of all causality, but all causation, as we know it, imitates that love.
This same Thomistic vision of Nature has been expressed by Meister Eckhart in a passage of rare beauty which I would like also to share with you. "You must understand," writes the German master, "that all creatures are by nature endeavoring to be like God. The heavens would not revolve unless they followed on the track of God or of his likeness. If God were not in all things, Nature would stop dead, not working and not wanting; for whether thou like it or no, whether thou know it or not, Nature fundamentally is seeking, though obscurely, and tending towards God. No man in his extremity of thirst but would refuse the proffered draught in which there was no God. Nature's quarry is not meat or drink nor clothes nor comfort nor any things at all wherein is naught of God, but covertly she seeks and ever more hotly she pursues the trail of God therein."