Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
system. Therefore, within matter lies a range of possibilities that emerge
or are actualized only when these particles are put into a system or a
previous system is restructured.
What are the implications of such a theory? Karl Rahner argues that
we are the beings “in whom the basic tendency of matter to find itself
in the spirit by self-transcendence arrives at the point where it definitely
breaks through.” For Rahner, “Matter develops out of its inner being in
the direction of spirit.”
76
This becoming—a becoming more, rather than
a becoming other—must be “effected by what was there before and, on
the other hand, must be the inner increase of being proper to the previ-
ously existing reality.” This notion of becoming more is a genuine self-
transcendence, a “transcendence into what is substantially new, i.e., the
leap to a higher
nature.
”
77
While Rahner does not argue that life, consciousness, matter, and
spirit are identical, he does maintain that such differences do not exclude
development:
Insofar as the self-transcendence always remains present in the particular
goal of its self-transcendence, and insofar as the higher order always embraces
the lower as contained in it, it is clear that the lower always precedes the
actual event of self-transcendence and prepares the way for it by the develop-
ment of its own reality and order; it is clear that the lower always moves
slowly toward the boundary line in its history, which it then crosses in actual
self-transcendence.
78
For Rahner, then, the human is the “self-transcendence of living
matter.” On the one hand, Rahner describes this as the cosmos becom-
ing conscious of itself in the human. On the other hand, this self-
transcendence of the cosmos reaches
its final consummation only when the cosmos in the spiritual creature, its goal
and its height, is not merely something set apart from its foundation—something
created—by something which receives the ultimate self-communication of its ulti-
mate ground itself, in that moment when this direct self-communication of God
is given to the spiritual creature in what we—looking at the historical pattern of
this self-communication—call grace and glory.
79
Lindon Eaves and Lora Gross offer another presentation of matter as
the ground for new potentialities. They argue for a dynamic, holistic
conception of matter that emphasizes the “unity of matter, life, and
energy and understands nature as a profoundly complex, evolving system
of intricately interdependent elements.”
80
They suggest a vitality in
