Grammar of Being

 Before "and" there has to be something else. ..."be" being the operative word there.   That is, before you have some kind of joining or togetherness, before you can affirm or deny,  you have to have an implicit "IS". I am probably not saying it with maximum clarity, but that is kind of the point here.   Language itself, which is the medium for thought, is radically dependent on a preceding ground.   

Chesterton is right to say that our English word "being" is not quite adequate to express this.  

Now it unfortunately happens that the word ‘being’, as it comes to a modern Englishman, through modern associations, has a sort of hazy atmosphere that is not in the short and sharp Latin word. Perhaps it reminds him of fantastic professors in fiction, who wave their hands and say, “Thus do we mount to the ineffable heights of pure and radiant Being: or, worse still, of actual professors in real life, who say, “All Being is Becoming; and is but the evolution of Not-Being by the law of its Being.” Perhaps it only reminds him of romantic rhapsodies in old love stories; “Beautiful and adorable being, light and breath of my very being”. Anyhow it has a wild and woolly sort of sound; as if only very vague people used it; or as if it might mean all sorts of different things. Now the Latin word Ens has a sound like the English word End. It is final and even abrupt; it is nothing except itself.

In English, "being" makes the construction "is" into an abstract.  But that "IS" is the precondition of everything else.   

One of the first books that Reginald Garrigou Lagrange wrote was on "Common Sense".   The second link takes you to the introduction of Matthew Minerd's English translation of RGL's book.   In that, he referred to an article by Guy Mansini, OSB which discusses this concept a bit further in light of the modern magisterium.   All good stuff, and the GKC excerpt I linked to is also on the same topic.   GKC is not a Thomist, nor an academic, but Thomists such as Etienne Gilson and Josef Pieper have recommended his book on Aquinas as a thoroughly perceptive starter resource.   

The part I am focusing on here though is the basic grounding of all thought on things.   And things are accessible to the ordinary man, to the hobbit -- to the baby, in fact.    This is a point recognized by Aristotle, who generally started his investigations into different topics by inquiring what the ordinary man thought.    

The mythology of modernity seems to include a premise that experts can somehow stand over and above what IS, and in fact critique even their own perceptions of it.    Again, Chesterton:  

The Thomist stands in the broad daylight of the brotherhood of men, in their common consciousness that eggs are not hens or dreams or mere practical assumptions; but things attested by the Authority of the Senses, which is from God. Thus, even those who appreciate the metaphysical depth of Thomism in other matters have expressed surprise that he does not deal at all with what many now think the main metaphysical question; whether we can prove that the primary act of recognition of any reality is real. The answer is that St. Thomas recognised instantly, what so many modern sceptics have begun to suspect rather laboriously; that a man must either answer that question in the affirmative, or else never answer any question, never ask any question, never even exist intellectually, to answer or to ask. 

According to Dom Mansini, Reginald Garrigou Lagrange's basic position on common sense was that the ordinary person has an implicit "philosophy of being" which encompasses basic notions of "thing or substance, of feature or accident, of cause and effect, of change and becoming, and of person and freedom and moral responsibility" which can be made more precise by realist philosophy (and presumably less so by misguided philosophies).  

These basic notions seem to be in a sense ratified by experience and reflection, but in another sense presumed by any agent or actor in the cosmos.  

We perceive things through our senses, but that does not mean that things are the products of our senses and intellects.  It is very radically the other way around.   This is a precondition even of those who deny it, as Chesterton points out.   

Garrigou Lagrange's further point was that dogma is comprehensible in an implicit way to the ordinary person because of their basic participation in this philosophy of being.   Or at least, this is how I understand it before reading his actual book.  

That doesn't mean that a given ordinary person is going to be correct on everything, of course.   As soon as you start formalizing your common sense, putting it into language, you are very likely to go wrong.   As I write this I am aware of using words that only gesture towards what I am trying to say.    By analogy, a baby's first attempts to interact with its environment -- to socialize with its family, to grasp and handle objects -- are clumsy and fitful, but by no means purposeless or random.       It seems that a small baby's project is a kind of assent or fiat to the world which is both related to and distinguished from himself -- only later does he recognize the possibility of denial, of contradiction.    Then it becomes his task to learn how to use that responsibly.