The Fred Martinez Report

  The Man Who Remembered That a Tree Was a Tree Imagine a man who becomes so fascinated with the fact that a tree exists that he gradually forgets what a tree is. He tells us, quite correctly, that the tree's existence is the most astonishing thing about it. It might never have existed at all; it owes its very being to an act of existence that it cannot give itself. He is right, and we should congratulate him on having discovered something that the ordinary gardener has somehow overlooked. But suppose he becomes so enthusiastic about this discovery that he begins to neglect the nature of the tree itself. He speaks endlessly of its existence, but very little of its roots, branches, leaves, growth, and the particular nature that makes it a tree rather than a stone or a horse. Étienne Gilson did not consider himself a semi-nominalist, but Jeffrey C. Kalb Jr. argues that Gilson’s "existential Thomism" inadvertently leans into a radically anti-essentialist, semi-nominalist dir...