On Aporetics and Apophatics: The Descriptive Metaphysics of Donald MacKinnon

Abstract

This article analyzes the dependencies of Donald MacKinnon on Aristotle and Immanuel Kant, particularly as regards to his 'descriptive metaphysics'. MacKinnon remains indebted to an Aristotelian aporetics of 'substance' that at once emphasizes the irrepressible particularity of entities, while simultaneously not resolving the tension between specific description and universal categories of meaning. This insight was contemporaneously mediated for MacKinnon through his reception of G.E. Moore, and especially in the way that his critique of Bradleyian 'internal relations' attempted to retain 'individuality' over against the collapse of objects into relational determinations. Kant's transcendental apriorism had a similar function for MacKinnon, although now with the added novelty of synthetic judgments which are adduced by Kant to grasp those imaginative totalities that were needed to garner 'experience' within the limits of reason alone. The article traces Kant's deepening impression on MacKinnon with respect to ontological analogy, showing through a theological genealogy how MacKinnon gradually becomes disenchanted with the analogia entis-a move which is dependent on a critique of Platonic methexis. In MacKinnon's mind, analogical metaphysics remains predicated on an intuitional account of being that transcends the critical strictures asserted by Kant, and moreover relies upon a questionable reading of 'being-as-predicate'. This constitutes MacKinnon's reception of a Kantian apophatics. The article concludes by suggesting that MacKinnon could have been better served in his attempt to collate historicity and metaphysics by retaining the analogical participation, and by supplementing his realism with a broadly Hegelian approach to the development of knowledge. Moreover, his Kantianism probably does not assist him as regards a re-articulation of the via negativa insofar as it remains in a diastasis between anthropocentricism and a transcendentally-formal sublime.

Kenosis as Therapy: Donald MacKinnon in Recent Literature

“…30 My sense overall though is that MacKinnon's earlier work in fact appears to lean towards more ontological accounts of analogia entis, and that gradually he becomes distanced from them as his Kantianism becomes stronger. 31 One can see this if one traces, genealogically, the scattered and relatively isolated references to analogy, starting from his earlier texts and moving to his more developed writings. 32 And this appears to happen in full knowledge of the Thomistic priority on the analogy of attribution 33 and the classical contention that "being" is an "analogically participated transcendental."…”