I've just gotten more ideas about how to use the concept of ownership as a starting point for talking about divine causality.
Here the analogy breaks down. As later sections of the Summa theologiae develop the notion of the first mover as one that is pure actuality with no potency: it is as if one argued for the existence of an unconditioned owner, which cannot have acquired from another and cannot lose ownership...
First a clarification: I intend this more as a very loose allegory than a strict analogy. That is, I'm not trying to say that God owns us (even though there are ways in which that is true): I"m just noting an analogy between the way we talk about renting/owning and the way we talk about created/creative causality.
1. We experience and/or discover ownership through the interrelating of a sequence of events, for example, hearing a story of how one comes to own then loan out something. At this level we note how individuals change in relation to each other while keeping their identity, and thereby form concepts of "acquire," "own," "sell," "rent," and the like.
2. We gain insight into general truths about the nature of ownership, lending, etc. These insights are achieved through a kind of analysis that uncovers necessary truths applicable to contingent facts, stable realities found in changes, simultaneities embedded in sequences, form in matter, etc. In the case of ownership, we see how owing something is a kind of relation between the owner, the owned, and others who we might call "nowners." There is a kind of simultaneity in this interrelationship. And necessity too, inasmuch as there cannot be an owner unless there is something that is owned; there cannot be a borrower unless there is a lender; etc.
3. We can now reason (in a manner loosely analogous to how one might reason about an unmoved mover) about how there must an owner who is in no way renting from another in order for there to be a someone who is renting without owing. That is, one starts with the observation that so-and-so is renting; then suppose that they are renting from a subletter, who is renting from a subletter, etc.; and next show that there cannot be an infinite series of subletters; concluding on that basis that must be someone who rents out without renting from another (a non-renting renter).
The first objection might be that there could be a series extending infinitely far into the past of persons who pass on the right to use the property in question and who might therefore serve more or less as counterexamples to the claim that the series must be finite.
The reply to this objection is that there is a kind of simultaneity, correlativity between renting-out and renting-from. Once this is recognized, the objection's assumption of sequentiality is recognized as a misunderstanding.
4. But one could also object that even owners in the proper sense of the word pass in and out of ownership (and in and out of existence). Hence the argument for non-renting rentor seems quite different from the argument for the first mover (or that the latter fails to get one to God because of its similarity to the argument for a non-renting rentor).
The first objection might be that there could be a series extending infinitely far into the past of persons who pass on the right to use the property in question and who might therefore serve more or less as counterexamples to the claim that the series must be finite.
The reply to this objection is that there is a kind of simultaneity, correlativity between renting-out and renting-from. Once this is recognized, the objection's assumption of sequentiality is recognized as a misunderstanding.
4. But one could also object that even owners in the proper sense of the word pass in and out of ownership (and in and out of existence). Hence the argument for non-renting rentor seems quite different from the argument for the first mover (or that the latter fails to get one to God because of its similarity to the argument for a non-renting rentor).
Here the analogy breaks down. As later sections of the Summa theologiae develop the notion of the first mover as one that is pure actuality with no potency: it is as if one argued for the existence of an unconditioned owner, which cannot have acquired from another and cannot lose ownership...
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