Clarke's Philosophical Journey

1.
I started off as a convinced Thomist from my first philosophical training

with the French Jesuits at Jersey, under the guidance of the brilliant young
Thomistic metaphysician, Andre Marc, from whom I developed a keen
appreciation of the basic metaphysical structure of the real according to the
vision of St. Thomas. Also decisive was my private reading of Joseph
Marechal’s whole history of Western thought, Point de depart de la
metaphysique, culminating in his seminal Vol. V on Aquinas himself, in which
he stressed the innate dynamism of the human intellect toward the Infinite
Fullness of being as the ultimate foundation of all human inquiry; added to
this was my underground reading of the then temporarily banned Blondel’s
Action (1st ed. 1893—better than all the later more cautious revisions), which
powerfully highlighted the complementary dynamism of the human will
toward the same fullness of being as good. I have always held onto these
two fundamental insights of St. Thomas as the basic for all human inquiry
and search for the good, but I am not a full card-carrying member of the
Transcendental Thomism school, for various technical reasons regarding
whether and how they reached fully existential being as the basis of
metaphysics by their method.
2. The historically important rediscovery of the profoundly existential

character of St. Thomas’s metaphysics, centered on the act of existence
(esse) as the fountainhead of all perfection, both in creatures and in God,
diversified by various modes of limiting essence, was just getting under way
when I was at Jersey (1936-39), under the dramatic leadership of Etienne
Gilson in the 5th edition of Le Thomisme, but I took full explicit possession of
this deeply integrating insight into Aquinas’s thought during my M.A. in
philosophy at Fordham, under the direction of Anton Pegis, disciple and
colleague of Gilson at Toronto. So I became what soon became known as an
“existential Thomist.”
3. The next significant phase of my philosophical development came during

my Ph.D. studies at Louvain, under the well-known Thomists Van
Steenberghen and De Raeymaeker. Here I shared in the exciting rediscovery
of the central role of Neoplatonic participation in the metaphysics of
Thomas, especially as the basic structure behind the relation of creatures to
God, going far beyond what he could get from Aristotle alone—all this from
my reading and discussions with Geiger, Fabro, De Finance, etc. Now I came
to understand St. Thomas’s entire metaphysical system as an original
synthesis of Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism. I wrote my thesis precisely
on the development of this synthesis in Thomas (summarized in the
first, widely circulated article in my list of publications) a theme not yet
widely known, it seems, in American Catholic Thomistic circles.
4. The last key element in my philosophical formation I picked up also during
my doctorate at Louvain. All around me were blossoming the new
movements of phenomenology, both the older more austere school of strict
Husserlian phenomenology, which interested me less than the newer more
existential interpersonalist phenomenologies of thinkers like Emmanuel
Mounier, Martin Buber, Gabriel Marcel, Maurice Nedoncelle, John Macmurray,
etc., and to a lesser extent Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger. I plunged
deeply into them for months, before returning to St. Thomas for my
dissertation. I saw the need now for both these approaches as
complementary to give us a more fully rounded understanding of the real.
The interpersonal phenomenologies need the ontological grounding of
dynamic substance or nature as a unified center for its many relations and
its self-identity through time; Thomistic metaphysics needs to enrich the
data it is seeking to explain by the more detailed concrete descriptions of the
actual life of real persons provided so richly by phenomenology. A creative
synthesis was needed. This I have tried to outline in Person and Being
(l993), now in its fifth printing, and my widely circulated article, “To Be Is to
Be Substance-in-Relation” (1992), which surprised many non-Thomists.
In doing this I identify myself with the growing, late 20th century movement
called “Personalist Thomism.” One leading center of this has been the Lublin
School of Thomism (Poland), of which the best-known representative is Karol
Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II), with his seminal book, The Acting Person and
other similar writings.

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1.

I started off as a convinced Thomist from my first philosophical training

2. The historically important rediscovery of the profoundly existential

3. The next significant phase of my philosophical development came during

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