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Degrees of Knowledge Jacques Maritain THE DEGREES OF KNOWLEDGE JACQUES MARITAIN ^7 ^HE DEGREES OF KNOWLEDGE GEOFFREY BLES: THE CENTENARY PRESS TWO MANCHESTER SQUARE, LONDON TRANSLATED FROM THE SECOND REVISED AND AUGMENTED FRENCH EDITION BY BERNARD WALL AND MARGOT R. ADAMSON TRANSLATOR'S NOTE In the original M. Maritain makes considerable use of the close kin- dred which exists between the actual forms ofcertain French words and that of Scholastic Latin. This involves considerable difficulties in trans- lation into a tongue not so closely related. At times, rather than risk a misunderstanding of a philosopher who naturally lays great stress on verbal exactitude, I have followed this angle of the sense rather than smoothness m the English. Philosophy can never make easy reading, and Gavin Douglas' plea is as pertinent to-day as in his time: For there be Latin wordis many one That in our tongue FIRST PUBLISHED 1037 tf ganand translation snane Les than we mynis thar sentence and 5 gravity ; And yet scant weill exponit... For ohjectum and subjectum also •4 He war expect culdfind me termis two $ In particular I would draw the reader's attention to the opposition be- tween rational and real being, corresponding £ to that between ens rationis and ens reale; and that, in general, £ it is in this sense that the word rational should primarily be understood. In the original the main text, which is here | integrally translated, is H Mowed by nine Appendices: these, owing to their great length and highly technical character, have here been omitted. I have given a brief summary of their content. No new matter is introduced in them, and in the main they consist of critical and technical discussions of points treated in the text, with long quotations in support and enlargement of individual stages in the argument. PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY Behnard "Wall ROBERT MACLEHOSB AND COMPANY LTD. THE UNIVERSITY PRESS GLASGOW 214556 CONTENTS F&GR Preface -----_____ ix Introduction. The Grandeur and Misery of Metaphysics - i PART ONE THE DEGREES OF RATIONAL KNOWLEDGE SHAFTER I. Philosophy and Experimental Science - - - - 27 II. Critical Realism --------86 HI. Our Knowledge of the Sensible World - - - 165 IV. Metaphysical Knowledge - - - - - - 24.8 PART TWO THE DEGREES OF SUPER-RATIONAL KNOWLEDGE V. Mystical Experience and Philosophy - - - - 305 VI. Concerning Augustinian Wisdom - - - 3 58 VII. Saint John of the Cross, the Practician of the Con- templative Life ------ 382 Conclusion. Todo y Nada - 43i A Summary of the Appendices 473 PREFACE title of this book Tm sufficiently declares its design. The disparate and the confused are alike alien to the nature of the mind. 'No one', says Tauler, 'knows better the true meaning of distinction than they who have entered into unity,' and in the same way no one can be aware ofthe real meaning unity of without an equal grasp of the sense of distinction. Thus every attempt at metaphysical synthesis, particularly in relation to the , complex riches of knowledge and the mind, must distinguish in order to unite. And it is exactly towards such a discernment of the vari- ous degrees of knowledge, their organisation and internal differentia- tion, that reflective and critical philosophy is primarily directed. Idealist philosophers usually choose some particular class of sciences as a generic type of the universe ofknowledge and construct in relation to this type their entire epistemology. Not only does this entail the sys- tematic neglect of vast regions of apprehension, but it tends also to re- duce the diversity of the life of the spirit to a noetic monism, which is certainly more sterile, if less pardonable, than the ontological monism of the first philosophers. (For, after all, the mind, they claim, does know itself, and what excuse can idealism offer if it despises the very structure ofthought itself?) In revenge many realists seem disposed to pay for their possession of things by an abandonment of the problems proper to the mind, and we see to-day a new 'cultural' dogmatism identifying with dialectic materialism the anti-idealism which it professes. I hope to show here that Thomist realism, while saving by a truly critical method the values of the knowledge of things, allows of an in- timate exploration of the universe of reflection, and the establishment, if I may say so, of a metaphysical topology: thus 'the philosophy of be- ing is at the same time and par excellence a 'philosophy of the spirit'. More even than the physical universe and corporeal organisms, the x PREFACE PREFACE xi dimensions, a structure, and in- spirit possesses—though immaterially— Contemporary idealism, In this book I have endeavoured to indicate the reasons for this move- ternal hierarchy, ofcausality and values. which proper structure in ment and these transitions and the main phases through which they ends by refusing to acknowledge any nature or the pass. pure movement or a pure liberty, spirit, in order to make of it either a entirety on one single level in reality only achieves flattening it out in its It is obvious, therefore, why this book must explore very varied universe, a world of infinite of intellection, as if in a two-dimensional fields of enquiry. After a form of general introduction, thinking that the whose theme is platitude. Nevertheless we have justification for four at once the grandeur and the misery of metaphysics, the first problems dimensions of which St. Paul speaks—quae sit latitudo, et hngitudo, et to be dealt with are those which concern the experimental sciences and 1 sphere or hypersphere sublimits, et profundum —concern not only the the degrees of knowledge which they represent. At this point, before organisation of the contemplation of the saints, but generally the whole going further, it becomes necessary to turn to knowledge as such, and to and fundamental structure of the things of the spirit, in the natural or establish (chapter ii) the principles of a philosophy of the intelligence; supernatural orders. so we enter into the dominion of that critical metaphysic, on whose Taken from the noetic angle which I have chosen, we may say that foundation the whole body of the book is based. The two following length symbolises for us the way in which the formal light which chapters have as their subject the philosophy of nature considered par- characterises a type ofknowledge falls on things and determines in them ticularly in its relations with the sciences, notably with physics, and a certain line of intelligibility; breadth corresponds to the ceaselessly metaphysical knowledge, particularly with regard to its noetic struc- growing sum of objects thus known; height to the difference of level ture and its relations with negative theology. With knowledge by faith created among the various forms of knowledge by the degrees of in- and the 'super-analogy' which is proper to it, we pass on to the degrees immateriality in the object, from which follow, for telligibility and of supra-rational knowledge, whose highest form is mystical experi- the its typical and original manner of procedure; as to each object, ence. Chapter v is consecrated to these problems, while chapters vi us those more hidden diversities fourth dimension, depth, it presents to and vii deal with two eminent cases ofwhat has just been described as in its liberty, diversifies which depend on the way in which the spirit, 'the depth' of the things of the spirit: the question of the nature of reality according still more its objects and its manner of conforming to Augustinian wisdom and the distinctive features and proper perspec- and practical to their final ends. The difference between speculative tive of the 'practically practical' science of contemplation as it is found but it is not philosophy is the simplest example of this diversification, in St. John of the Cross. The last chapter forms the conclusion to the the only one. whole book and deals with that doctrine of All and Nothing set out by the elan But it is not only the structure, it is the movement also and the Mystical Doctor, and with the supreme degree both of knowledge admirable law of the spirit which need to be brought to light, and that and ofwisdom which is accessible to man in this life. which, ofdissatisfaction with the very security ofacquired certitudes by It is by design that I have endeavoured to cover so wide a field ofpro- starting from the experience of the senses, the mind enlarges, raises, blems and sketched the outline of a synthesis which starts with the ex- transforms itself from stage to stage, absorbing itself in contradictory perience of the physicist and ends with that ofthe contemplative, whose that and yet united spheres of knowledge, while testifying to the fact philosophic stability is guaranteed by the rational certitudes of meta- 1 tlie striving of an immaterial life for its perfection is a striving to- physics and critical philosophy. Only in this way is it possible to exhibit an the zones of wards an infinite amplitude, that is to say, in the last resort, towards the organic diversity and the essential compatibility of great in quest of object, an infinite reality which it must needs in some manner possess. knowledge traversed by the mind in this movement a tiny fragment and J£pli.iii, 18. being, to which each one of us can only contribute PREFACE Xll PREFACE xiii that at the risk of misunderstanding the activities of his comrades tained from the theologians just as he applies that obtained from the bio- other tasks equally fragmentary, but which are absorbed in reconciled in logists or the physicists. die whole in the thought of the philosopher, almost the unity of despite Where the unbelieving reader is unable to accept the truth of the themselves, like brothers ignorant of their fraternity.
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