<snip>
What is "univocity of being"? This term
strikes me as weirdly categorical - I don't understand what "univocity"
can mean (one voice? seriously?) & "being" is a term that makes me reach
for my Browning (not the poet), since it is a metaphorical (ab)use of a
copulative, a great rhetorical con that has been befuddling thinkers for
millennia. [MJW]
To say that Being is univocal is to say that Being *speaks*: that it
is a single "clamour", and that it "is said in the same way of
everything" - every being - "of which it is said". [DF]
<snip>
Just to take the concept back a few centuries and make it a little less
continental, the term goes back at least to Scotus drawing on Avicenna:
beingness (as distinct from, say, haecceity or thingness and as opposed,
along with haecceity, to nothingness), be-ing as the scientific object of
metaphysics. So for the God-interested Scotus, the point of metaphysics is
to demonstrate that God is the absolute being, who fashions creatures in
their haecceity but also in their be-ing. And that be-ing is a conceptual
primitive which allows one to link ourselves to God, to talk about God and
humanity in the same breath: God's be-ing is infinite, mine isn't; but
be-ing is univocal, common to both of us, nonetheless.
CW
_______________________________________________
'Listen people, I don't know how you expect to ever stop the
war if you can't sing any better than that'
- Country Joe McDonald, Woodstock 1969
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