Resumen
This study analyzes the way in which contemporary Thomistic metaphysics has dealt with Heidegger’s Denken. To make the investigation more precise and systematic, two methodological choices were made. In the first place, three Thomists were chosen that, on the one hand, addressed the thought of Heidegger at length, but that, on the other, hail from three different cultural areas and illustrate three profondly different theoretical positions within the framework of Thomistic thought: the French Dominican Maurice Corvez, the German Jesuit Johann Baptist Lotz, and the Italian Stigmatine Father Cornelio Fabro. In the second place, the comparison between the Thomistic metaphysics of esse and the Heideggerian meditation on Sein was structured around two coordinates: first, the relationship between Dasein and being, second, the relationship between “to be” and a being, the Thomistic analogon of which are the relationship between ens as primum cognitum and the being of things, and that between esse and ens in the thing itself.
In this way, the study presents three opposing configurations of Thomistic ens, and therefore three very different evaluations of Heideggerian thought. For Corvez, and for the Thomism proper to the Dominican tradition, real ens is the realization of a formal act by an existential act, the latter being strictly proportioned to the former; for this reason, the composition of essence and esse does not imply any ontological difference between ens and the being by which it is. What results is a fundamentally negative evaluation of Heidegger’s reflection. From the perspective of “Transcendental Thomism”, finite ens is conceived of as the real limitation of an esse that consciousness anticipates as the ideal totality of possibles, such that the ontological difference is grasped as the constitutive nucleus of both reality and thought. For this reason, Lotz offers a positive judgment on Heidegger’s work, yet points out that an ultimate foundation of being on Ipsum Esse Subsistens is lacking. According to Fabro, ens is seen as a synthetic plexus that unites a specifying essence and an intensive act of being, and underscores the “emergence” of the latter over both the content of the thing and the act that thinks of ens. For this reason, he concedes that Heidegger’s presentation of the ontological difference is a powerful stimulus for the metaphysical problem, but holds that it cannot be considered as a valid solution to that same problem.
