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Whence Intelligibility? Cultural Heritage and Contemporary Change Series I. Culture and Values, Volume 43 General Editor George F. McLean Whence Intelligibility? Edited by Louis Perron The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy Copyright © 2014 by The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy Box 261 Cardinal Station Washington, D.C. 20064 All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Whence intelligibility? / edited by Louis Perron. -- first [edition]. pages cm. -- (Cultural heritage and contemporary change. Series I, Culture and values ; Volume 43) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Comprehension (Theory of knowledge) 2. Philosophy. 3. Thought and thinking. 4. Reason I. Perron, Louis, 1963- BD181.5.W44 2013 2013036848 121--dc23 CIP ISBN 978-1-56518-290-5 (pbk.) TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 Louis Perron Part I: Theoretical Reason Chapter I. Wittgenstein, Form, and the Criterion of Understanding 13 Robbie Moser Chapter II. Explanation, Principle, & the Idea of God 31 Leslie Armour Chapter III. Intelligibility, Metaphor, and Conceptual Transfiguration 47 Elizabeth Trott Part II: Practical Reason Chapter IV. Maritain, Aquinas, and the Intelligibility of the 61 Natural Law David J. Klassen Chapter V. Moral Intelligibility and the Social Imaginary 81 Sheila Mason Part III: Modern Reason and Its Challenges Chapter VI. Intelligibility versus Proof: Philosophical Method 95 in Pascal and Descartes Louis Groarke Chapter VII. Modernity and Intelligibility: A Comparison of the 115 Interpretations of René Guénon and Jacques Maritain David Lea Part IV: Specific Areas of Intelligibility: Knowing God and the Human Person Chapter VIII. Maritain and Intellectual Mysticism 131 David C. Bellusci Chapter IX. The Mystery of Intersubjectivity 143 Nikolaj Zunic Chapter X. Is the “Intelligibility of Religious Language” 159 Debate Dead? William Sweet Contributors 177 Index 179 INTRODUCTION LOUIS PERRON Nobody will contest that intelligibility is a fundamental philosophical theme, one that has puzzled philosophers since the very beginnings of philosophy. Indeed, the notion of intelligibility stands at the very heart of what philosophy is all about. Plainly stated: would philosophy exist at all if there were no experience of what we call “intelligibility”? Is not that experience the source, the origin of all philosophizing? Since its beginnings, philosophy has indeed been said to owe its existence to the fact that the world is astonishing, amazing. The world of course is not always intelligible and certainly not entirely intelligible. Reality resists in numerous ways our search for intelligibility. From this opposite perspective, one could say that it is our experience of the opacity of the world that triggers the quest for intelligibility. Both sides are intertwined: our experience of the world teaches us that both intelligibility and unintelligibility characterize it at the same time. We both experience intelligibility and its absence. Intelligibility would then be an ambiguous and mixed experience, at the same time positive and negative. Besides, another duality can be identified. Intelligibility is fundamentally something we experience about and within the world – experience, here, means our sheer encounter with the world, in other words, the fact that existence in its pure facticity is put to the test – an experience that occurs when reality seems to answer, albeit partially, our attempts to shed light on it and our need to understand it. Intelligibility happens, occurs. There is a passive side to the experience of intelligibility. We find ourselves in “intelligibility” like a milieu. The world as our dwelling place makes sense – if not perfectly, at least to some extent. But there is also an active side. In engaging the world, what was encountered first as pure darkness, pure opacity, becomes clearer and more porous. Intelligibility becomes an activity, the outcome of human agency. Despite the fact that we do experience what we call intelligibility – or again, its lack – like all basic philosophical questions, intelligibility is a real conundrum. The experience of intelligibility should always remain an amazing one. We may know on existential grounds what we mean when way say that a reality is intelligible, but that does not mean that we can justify it. Why is the world intelligible? What makes it intelligible? So we need to push that issue further and ask: Why after all should there be intelligibility? Do we have some kind of right to expect intelligibility? Maybe the answer would be easier if there was no such thing as the experience of unintelligibility. If the mere experience of intelligibility can be troubling, what then do we say when we encounter its opposite? It is this mixed and contrasted experience of intelligibility and unintelligibility at the same time that captures the challenge raised by intelligibility. 2 Louis Perron How can we explain the mere presence of intelligibility? What exactly is intelligibility? and unintelligibility? Why is intelligibility experienced with unintelligibility? These are just a sample of questions that come to mind. This difficulty probably explains why intelligibility is most often approached indirectly and not as an issue in itself. It is a kind of question that seems to escape any direct or simplistic answer. We experience intelligibility or its absence, but when summoned to explain it, we do not know what to say. And still, philosophy could be defined as the quest for intelligibility, and often – even if not essentially – as a struggle against the absence of intelligibility. To inquire about intelligibility, then, amounts to inquiring about what philosophy is all about. In a sense, philosophy can be defined as an attempt to clarify and explain what we experience and speak about as intelligibility, the fundamental experience of intelligibility. This book intends to shed some light upon that experience. To enquire about intelligibility as such is not an easy task, especially if one wishes to situate oneself in the largest possible perspective, i.e., to adopt a truly philosophical standpoint. The issue is most often approached through a particular philosophical system or school. Indeed, the history of philosophy can be viewed as the exposition of the different interpretations of intelligibility that have been proposed through the ages. Each philosophy is an attempt to elucidate what intelligibility is all about. In other words, beyond the level of extreme generalization, hermeneutical presuppositions are engaged. This introduction is thus itself an interpretation.1 At the same time, as an introduction to a collection of papers, it stays purposely at a fairly general level. Its aim is to offer a summary of what can be considered as the classical view on intelligibility. I will argue that intelligibility, in Western philosophy, has mainly been understood in three non-contradictory ways: from a “subjective” perspective, as a “natural” capacity to shed light upon the world in which we are embedded; from an “objective” perspective, as a property of the world itself; and finally, from a “second degree” objective perspective, as a property pertaining to the various objectivities produced by reason itself. Intelligibility is closely linked with meaning and knowledge. A thing is said to be intelligible when we understand it. The traditional metaphor of light is of great help here: to experience intelligibility is to experience enlightenment. The absence of intelligibility is precisely the opposite: the absence of light, the incapacity to illuminate things, a failure to remove obscurity and darkness. Intelligibility is based on a presumption, a kind of rational faith in reality, that the latter will answer positively, that intelligibility is there to be found. In turn, this presumption exists because we do experience some intelligibility in our encounter with the world. Traditionally, the word “intelligibility” has been used to refer to a certain kind of capacity proper to human being and, jointly, to a property pertaining to reality itself. As a human agency, intelligibility is expressed through words such as intelligence, thought, mind, and reason. Intelligibility Introduction 3 indicates the natural light that human beings find in themselves as rational beings, when they engage in some theoretical enterprise but also when they intervene as rational agents. It is what takes place when we grasp a content that corresponds to intellectual intentionality. Intelligibility refers to the disclosure of meaning. It reveals itself as a capacity to grasp the features of what is to be known, by which the object known becomes intelligible. An object becomes intelligible when we understand it. To understand something is to gain access to the source of intelligibility which precisely reveals the intelligibility of the thing, makes the thing intelligible. The thing becomes intelligible when it shows itself as it is, when it manifests itself as and in itself. When this event happens, an intelligible world, the world of intelligibility, shows itself. This world forms true knowledge or science (episteme ). Through intelligibility, reason manifests itself as a power of elucidation that makes reality available to mind. This power brings reality into realm of intelligibility, it reveals reality as intelligibility. Going beyond what is simply given, reason unveils the conditions of the possibility of reality. It goes beyond the sensible and the visible. Reason
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