For a
Scholastic Aristotelian like Aquinas, though the human intellect is immaterial,
it is unfurnished until sensory experience gives it contact with
mind-independent physical reality. Even
when it rises to the highest of the metaphysical heights and comes to know
something of the immaterial and divine First Cause of all things, it does so
only on the basis of inference from what it knows about matter. An angelic
intellect, by contrast, is completely separate from matter and thus from
sensory organs. Its knowledge is built
into it at its creation. And since it is
God who then furnishes it, there is, naturally, no chance of error so long as
the angel wills to attend to what it knows.
Descartes’
account of human knowledge essentially assimilates it to this angelic
model. For him, knowledge of the basic
structure of reality is innate, rather than deriving from sensory
experience. This includes knowledge even
of the nature of material things. We
need only confine our judgements to accepting those propositions and inferences
that strike us as “clearly and distinctly” true and valid, respectively, for
God would not allow us to be misled about those. Error creeps in only when the will
overreaches that limit and embraces some claim or inference that is not clear and distinct. A purely mathematical conception of matter is
a natural concomitant of this account of knowledge, for it alone has the
requisite clarity and distinctness.
The problem,
of course, is that we are not in fact
angels; a faculty of infallible judgment is not
built into us; and we cannot read off
the natures of mind-independent things from our ideas of them. Hence, when we interpret human knowledge in
light of Descartes’ erroneous model, we are bound seriously to misunderstand
it. On the one hand, we might fall into
a dogmatism that mistakenly takes a certain successful – but nevertheless
limited and fallible – way of conceiving of the world as if it were an exhaustive and necessary way of doing
so. On the other hand, we might fall
into a subjectivism that despairs of ever getting beyond our own ideas to
objective reality. Both tendencies
result from taking our own representations
of the world to be all we really know directly.
The first tendency, which takes these representations to be angel-like
in their adequacy to reality, yields excessive optimism. The second tendency, which comes to see that
our representations are not
angel-like, yields excessive pessimism.
Kant did not
transcend these two opposite extreme errors of dogmatism and subjectivism, but
rather combined them. On the one hand, he takes what is essentially
just a modern, post-Cartesian account of the nature of the mind’s cognition of
reality and dogmatizes it – confining our knowledge of the natural world to what post-Newtonian science has to tell us about
it, and ruling out altogether any genuine knowledge of what transcends the
natural world (such as the existence of God and the immortality of the
soul). On the other hand, he takes even
our knowledge of the natural world to be knowledge only of how it appears to
us, and not of things as they are in themselves.
The upshot,
says Maritain, is that:
With [Descartes’] theory of
representational ideas the claims of Cartesian reason to independence of external
objects reach their highest point: thought breaks with Being. It forms a sealed world which is no longer in
contact with anything but itself; its ideas, now opaque effigies interposed
between it and external objects, are still for Descartes a sort of lining of
the real world… Here again Kant finishes Descartes’ work. If the intelligence when it thinks, reaches
immediately only its own thought, or its representations, the thing hidden
behind these representations remains for ever unknowable. (p. 78)
Ironically,
though, the sequel is not greater humility but rather a prideful
self-deification. If it cannot make
sense of a reality independent of itself, the modern mind all too often decides
to make itself the measure of reality:
The result of a usurpation of the
angelic privileges, that denaturing of human reason driven
beyond the limits of its species, that lust for pure spirituality, could only
go to the infinite: passing beyond the world of created spirits it had to lead
us to claim for our intelligence the perfect autonomy and the perfect
immanence, the absolute independence, the aseity of the uncreated intelligence… [I]t remains the secret principle of
the break-up of our culture and of the disease of which the apostate West seems
determined to die…
[B]ecause it wants an absolute and
undetermined liberty for itself, it is natural that human thought, since
Descartes, refuses to be measured objectively or to submit to intelligible
necessities. Freedom with respect to the
objective is the mother and nurse of all modern freedoms… we are no longer
measured by anything, subject to anything whatever! Intellectual liberty which Chesterton compared
to that of the turnip (and that is a libel on the turnip), and which strictly
only belongs to primal matter. (pp. 79-80)
Hence the
varieties of idealism and relativism (perspectivalism, historicism, social
constructivism,postmodernism,
etc.) that have plagued Western thought and culture in the centuries after
Kant.
That’s an
old story, of course, and a more complicated one than these remarks from
Maritain let on. But it’s not what I
want to consider here. Rather, what
catches my eye is the comparison of the modern mind (as it tends to conceive of
itself) to “primal matter.” What does
Maritain mean by this?
Prime
matter, in Aristotelian-Scholastic philosophy, is the pure potentiality to take
on form. Prime matter by itself is not any particular thing at
all. It becomes a concrete particular thing
of some kind – water, gold, lead, a star, a tree, a dog, a human body, or
whatever – only when conjoined with some substantial form or other. And qua pure potentiality for form, it can
become any of these things. It is not limited to being a physical thing only
of a certain kind (as is secondary matter,
matter already having some substantial form or other). (For discussion and defense of the notion of
prime matter, see pp. 171-75 of Scholastic
Metaphysics and pp. 310-24 of Aristotle’s
Revenge.)
Maritain’s analogy
is clear enough, then. Just as prime
matter can become anything (or at least anything physical, to be more precise)
so too do constructivist and relativist theories make of human nature something
indefinitely malleable. But this might
at first glance seem an odd criticism for an Aristotelian-Thomistic philosopher
like Maritain to level against such views.
For Aristotle holds that knowledge involves the intellect’s taking on the
form of the thing known. And there is no
limit in principle to what forms the intellect might in this way take on. Indeed, Aristotle famously remarks in De Anima that, given this power of the
intellect to take on the forms of all things, “the soul is in a way all the
things that exist” (Book III, Chapter 8).
But if Aristotelians themselves allow that the intellect can in this
sense become anything, why is there a problem with the views Maritain is
criticizing saying something similar?
And why compare these views’ conception of human nature to prime matter,
rather than to Aristotle’s own conception of the intellect?
The answer
is to be found by answering another question, namely: What is the difference
between the way prime matter takes on
a certain form, and the way the intellect
takes it on? The difference is this:
When prime matter takes on the form of a dog, the result is a dog.
But when the intellect takes on the form of a dog, the result is not a dog. Rather, it is knowledge of a dog. When
Aristotle says that the soul – or to be more precise, one specific faculty of
the soul, the intellect – is all things, he is, of course, speaking
figuratively. The intellect does not
really become a dog when it grasps the form of a dog. To be sure, the figure of speech is apt,
because, by taking on the form of a dog, the intellect takes on the nature of a dog. The intellect takes on “dogginess.” But to take it on merely intellectually is precisely to take it on without actually being a dog. By contrast, for matter to take on that
nature just is to take it on in the sort of way that does entail being a dog.
This should make it clear why Maritain’s analogy is appropriate. Views that take reality to be relative to our perceptions, our language, our conventions, etc. make human beings out to be something like prime matter insofar as they entail that what a human being is (and not just what a human being knows) is indefinitely malleable, susceptible of changing with changes in perception, language, conventions, etc. And, in fact, that is simply not true of us. We are, among other things, by nature rational animals, and no change in our perceptions, language, conventions, or the like can change that in the least. The most such changes can do is blind us to reality, but without changing reality itself.