THE METAPHYSICAL ATTRACTION OF MAN AND HIS PRIVATIVE SITUATION IN SUÁREZ’S DM I

Abstract

In the context of Suárez’s metaphysics this study exposes the implicit phenomenon of mental “disquiet” that occurs when someone is deprived of the knowledge of first causes that is available in metaphysics. The argumentative basis of the phenomenon is systematically supported in the in-terpretative review carried out by Suárez in Disputationes Metaphysicae I, Section VI, numbers 1-15 on the first sentence of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, a phenomenon which he translates and understands according to its true meaning “the natural appetite for science is innate to man” and, more specifi-cally, for metaphysics, because it is constitutive to man on the basis of the human essence as a rational animal. Since the highest human perfection and happiness in this life lies in the understand-ing of metaphysics, its privation entails and explains the emergence of a self-referential “restless-ness” in man.