METAFISIKA MASA KINI: Suatu Ulasan atas Metafisika Herman Berger

The metaphysics of Herman Berger (1924 - ) may be called Transcendental Thomism. Berger himself calls his metaphysics, Hermeneutics. The original text of the metaphysics of Thomas Aquinas is ambiguous. The intuition of Thomas is a metaphysics of being. The relation between beings and essence is a relation between act (of being) and potency. Being is prior to the essence. But in the beginning the metaphysics of Thomas seems to be a metaphysics of essences. The ground of uniqueness is not being but the essence. In the theory of representationism the startingpoint is a dualism of immanence and transendence. As long as the startingpoint is a kind of dualism, there is no way to know the correspondence between knowledge (immanent) and the reality outside (transcendent). The transcendental method asks “what kind of (pre)- knowledge makes me aware that my knowledge is finiteâ€. That is only possible by the presence of an infinite knowledge. Our knowledge is at the same time infinite and finite, immanent and transcendent, divine and human. The first is pre-nowledge; complete but implicit, vague and needs to be expressed conceptually. The latter is explicit but never complete. Anexplicitation is true in so far it expresses the implicit knowledge. A concept is clear but never complete because it is universal, while reality is concrete and individual. The pre-knowledge is “as wide as all the realityâ€; it is the ground for judging whether an explanation is true or not. All beings have a vertical relation to Being because they are contingens. Every uniqueness is a gift. There are degrees of uniqueness and everything has its own individuality according to its being