Jacques Maritain: the Intuition of Being and Epistemology

According to Robert Dennehy, in his article “Maritain’s ‘Intellectual Existentialism’: An Introduction to His Metaphysics and Epistemology”, Jacques Maritain’s metaphysics is intimately linked with his epistemology by what Maritain calls the “intuition of being” (Dennehy 202). In this relationship between his metaphysics and his epistemology, Maritain insists that metaphysics is primary and has priority over epistemology. Maritain calls his view of Epistemology a “Critical Realism” (Maritain, Distinguish to Unite or The Degrees of Knowledge 71). For Maritain, “what the mind knows is identical with what exists” (Sweet). Expressed differently, to know a thing means that the thing’s ‘essence’ exists ‘immaterially’ in the mind as an object of knowledge and we know the real by this concept or what Maritain calls “esse intentionale”. As said previously, Maritain forms an intimate link between his Metaphysics and his Epistemology. Robert Dennehy, in the section of his article introducing Maritain’s Epistemology, expresses this linkage saying “that if metaphysics studies being as being, epistemology studies being as known. I wish here to explore briefly this linkage, so as to understand Maritain’s approach to the real. In so doing, I hope to approach his epistemology in a similar manner and therefore be able to give a fair recounting of what Maritain calls a “realistic noetic¹” comprised of ‘thing, object, and concept’. “For the real is intelligible and as such is knowable by means of concepts” (Dennehy 214)

Part 1: The Link?

For Maritain the link between metaphysics and epistemology exists in that the mind has as its “proper object” being. However, being for Maritain is a thing of great mystery. In his book A Preface to Metaphysics, Maritain says the following about being:

…being is a mystery, either because it is too pregnant with intelligibility, too pure for our intellect, which is the case with spiritual things, or because its nature presents a more or less impenetrable barrier to understanding, a barrier due to the element of nonbeing in it, which is the case with becoming, potency and above all, matter. (A Preface to Metaphysics 12-13).

It is because being, which is a mystery, is the object of knowledge that Maritain so tightly links the study of metaphysics to the study of epistemology. Yet as said earlier, metaphysics is the study of being as such, while epistemology is the study of being as known. In both cases however, the object is that of being. Since the notion of being is often misunderstood, Maritain is sure to clarify that by being he does not mean the “particularized being” which we experience every day and which is the object of the empirical sciences. To the contrary, Dennehy says that Maritain intends the very same understanding of being in his epistemology as he does in his metaphysics (Dennehy 204-205). What links these two fields is what Maritain calls the “intuition of being”. In metaphysics, this is an intuition of being as such. In epistemology, it is an intuition of being as known in a thing. In both instances there is a ‘knowing’ that takes place atemporally and pre-intellection, hence it is an intuition (Maritain, Distinguish to Unite or The Degrees of Knowledge 91).

Part 2: Thing & Object and Their Concept

As a critical realist, Maritain deals directly with the existent thing — the real. In beginning the section in The Degrees of Knowledge entitled “Critical Realism”, Maritain says that it is necessary to draw a distinction between the “thing as thing”, which exists for itself, and the “thing as object”, when it is made present to the faculty of knowledge, because the same thing is observed simultaneously, both in nature (so as to exist) and in the mind (as it is known) (90-91). While this distinction can be drawn and is necessary, epistemologically speaking, for Maritain, the two terms — thing and object — cannot be separated (93).

The thing in the world — the real — is simple enough to understand from the common sense. By thing Maritain means “an existence independent of my cogito, an existence posited in its own right before my act of thinking and independent of it” or to borrow language from the Philosophy of Nature “the ontological ‘for itself’” (91 and 93). The thing has an existence which is extramental or premental, existing before we know it — “it does not belong to the realm of the known as known” (91). Maritain is careful to say that by extramental existence he does not intend only “actual existence” but also “possible existence” (92). This is the case because our intellects in “simple apprehension, abstract from existence in act and in judgments”, judging not only what exists, “but also of a thing that can or cannot exist and of the de jure necessities contained in those essences” (92). These “possible existences” are possible existences in the extramental world. This “possible real”, Maritain is explicit, is not to be confused with a “being of reason”, which is what occurs in a faulty noetic when the actual real is taken to be the only real (92). Thing is also called by Maritain, objectifiable subject and transobjective subject. These names do not indicate a hidden-ness of the thing behind the object, but that “because it is itself grasped as object” while still constituent of “something irreducible in which the possibility of grasping something new remains open” (93-94).

As said above, the nature of thing to object is such that they are inseparable within a realistic noetic. Before continuing on to discuss the nature of concept it is necessary to look more closely at the relationship which bonds the notions of thing and object so tightly together. Maritain does so using Thomistic language. In his explanation, “the thing is the ‘material object’ of the sense and intellect” (93). The object therefore is the “formal object”. Both are grasped simultaneously and indivisibly by the selfsame perceptions — metaphysically they are one entity. Maritain says, the “intellect’s objects as such abstract from actual existence and in themselves involve only a possible existence” (91). In terms of metaphysical language, the intellect’s object exists as a pure potentiality, whereas the thing in itself exists with both potentiality and actuality.

Having intended to write a section devoted specifically to object as such, I have found it impossible to write about object apart from its extramental reality, namely thing. They are so tightly connected, that to talk of one is to talk simultaneously about the other. Maritain says,

Because being is the first thing given to the mind, it is impossible to think of a pure object separated from a being for itself, a being of which the object of sensation or understanding is but a determination or aspect. If such an object is not an aspect of a known thing, of a transobjective subject, then it will have to become an aspect of the knowing thing. (100).

It is indeed these two co-principles — thing and object — which comprise the known.

As Maritain transitions into the section of The Degrees of Knowledge entitled “the Concept”, he poses the following questions: “What is the means by which the union of the known and the knower is effected? What is the medium thanks to which the thing known exists intentionally in the knower and thanks to which the knower becomes the thing known? This medium, Maritain, calls the intellect. He says, “the intellect has intentionally become the object” (117). This takes place when the intellect is “actuated by the species impressa, and then producing within itself a species expressa of the intelligible order, an ‘elaborated’ or ‘uttered’ ‘presentative form’” (117). This elevates the object to the “highest level of actuality and intelligible formation”, and so they become “vicars of the object” — pure likenesses thereof. Therefore knowing “consists, not in making, but in being; to be or become a thing — either itself or other things” beyond the actuation of a substance (117-118).

To begin to understand the notion of concept it is important that it first be distinguished from object. Maritain says that object and concept are indistinguishable one from the other except for by their respective roles in the intellect. He says that one makes known (concept), and the other is known (object). Concept therefore is a formal sign the essence of which is to signify — “to bear the mind to something other than itself” (120). Concepts are the presentative forms retained in memory. They constitute “not the that which is known”, but the “means by which we know” (120).

Concepts exist in several classes, mathematical, geometric, and words. It is essential that concepts be both abstract and universal. For example, the utterance, “The car is red” contains two concepts ‘car’ and ‘red’. Each of these illicit within the intellect a calling forth, as it were, of the presentative forms contained within the memory of ‘car’ and ‘red’ which enable immediate knowledge of the object ‘red car’ (123). In such a way, full knowledge of the real is known, retained, and recalled, through the sense encounter with the thing and its being known as object, and its future signification as concept.

Works Cited

Dennehy, Raymond. "Maritain's "Intellectual Existentialism": An Introductin to His Metaphysics and Epistemology." Understanding Maritain: Philosopher and Friend. Ed. Deal W. Hudson and Matthew J. Mancini. Macon: Mercer University Press, 1987. 201-234.

Maritain, Jacques. Distinguish to Unite or The Degrees of Knowledge. Trans. Gerald B. Phelan. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1959.

—. A Preface to Metaphysics: Seven Lectures on Being. New York: New American Library, 1962

—. The Range of Reason. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1953.

Sweet, William. "Jacques Maritain." Sept. 2008. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Ed.Edward N. Zalta. 27 September 2008 .

Footnotes

1 By noetic Maritain means ‘source of knowledge’.