A NOTE ON CREATED THINGS AND ARTIFACTS
The various forms of “Existentialism” are, in their turn, a necessary and salutary repudiation of their own era. And in this, they are reinforced by St. Thomas.
The world in which man today leads his ordinary life is becoming more and more a purely technological one. The things with which he is concerned are artificial; they are artifacts, not creations. The danger inherent in this situation is that man might, erroneously, come to regard the world as a whole and the created things with it—above all, man himself—in the same manner in which he regards, correctly, his own artifacts belonging to the technological sphere; in other words, man is beginning to consider the whole of creation as completely fathomable, fully accessible to rational comprehension, and, above all, as something which it is permissible to change, transform, or even destroy.
Engels, in a misconclusion which is well-nigh classical, infers from the productibility of artificial things the possibility of exhaustive knowledge of all natural reality (“practical experience, i.e., experimental research and industry” have brought about “the most crushing refutation” of the philosophical “fallacy” which denies “the possibility of an exhaustive knowledge” of the misconclusion which for good reasons has been formally accepted into the official doctrine of
In opposition, contemporary Existentialism, for instance Sartre, stresses forcefully the difference between artificial and natural things. A new emphasis appears here which seems to me post-modern, while the properly “modern” thinking hardly perceives and certainly does not stress this difference. Properly modern thinking inclines to what it believes to be a specifically “realistic” view—a view which does not emphasize the difference between immediate reality and man-made things, but tends to see forest, river, fields and housing development, bridge, factory as one and the same reality, as “the world around us,” our world.
St. Thomas, on the contrary, likewise distinguishes clearly and unequivocally between the res naturalis and the res for a reason not unlike that of the Existentialists. The res artificialis received its “measure” from man, but not so the res St. Thomas would agree with Sartre in his warning of contemporary man against the dangers of a purely technological environment: Do not think that you can speak in the same manner about the “nature” of man as you may about the “nature” of a letter opener, the design of which has come out of your own head. Sartre, however, spoils the force and validity of this warning when he adds that there is no such thing as a “design” for man, and therefore, no “human nature.” The inescapable conclusion is that you can make what you like of yourself and of
It is at this point that the negative relevance of St. Thomas’s teaching, its “untimely timeliness,” appears.