Christ is born! Glorify Him!
So, X, this will be somewhat summary, even if it is lengthy. But, you have asked the question at the heart of an important distinction, namely the distinction between the subjective reception of forms and the objective-intentional reception thereof. Indeed, between these two ways of receiving forms, we have all the difference between knowers and non-knowers:
You can also find this text posted on my dead old repository website, which I wish I had a way to use to better ends….:
Also, let me say UP FRONT that I do express some vexations herein with regard to Thomist intellectual culture. This is just one of my little vexations that, no doubt, has some overstatement involved—though, it also has some truth. I’m a big proponent of thinking in the school and thus was greatly scarred by certain experiences in graduate school. (Mind you, I have great affection for CUA. But, there was a line of textual purism that always made me feel like I didn’t fit in. Indeed, among students, even, I was dismissively referred to as “that Maritain guy.” This has made it difficult for me to interact with folks formed at Thomas Aquinas College ever since, for they were often the ones who used this derisively. But, I truly see it as being MY problem to get over a bit of bruised ego. Still, when it comes to intellectual claims like one from E. Stump quoted below, I get very hot under the collar, for the anti-scholae approach is something like a return to barbarism in my opinion, losing hundreds of years of reflection. My approach is expressed in the great words of Michel Labourdette, a man forgotten for many years because of the claptrap that came to infect Catholic thought for decades upon decades, though God be praised that the Revue Thomiste is doing justice by republishing the lecture notes of this man who was its editor for many years:
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St. Thomas obviously has neither said everything nor seen everything. He has not dug down into, nor applied, each of his principles [in full]. He integrated into his synthesis false historical and scientific knowledge which strongly influenced a number of his philosophical conceptions. He held in his own mind many views common in his own era, views that he did not critique, though they did not depend on his own metaphysical outlook. He paid little attention to values which now seem to us to be issues of the first rank of importance. He ignored a great number [quantités] of things that would have inspired great metaphysical insights and admirable theological explanations. He had a determinate end, that of a professor, which slightly deflect even a scholar’s view [qui infléchit un peu même celui du savant]. He has a language which is indeed admirable, given how he says exactly what he means, though this language can indeed be significantly enriched. And then there is his spiritual temperament, one that is marvelously conducive for the work of a scholar, though it was that of his own, personal holiness. Finally, if a mortal could be permitted to live centuries in the full strength of his maturity, accompanied with the full, lively, and innovative curiosity of youth, it is clear that he would not have ceased to progress, to draw to himself for his own self-growth everything that other minds would have felt and discovered concerning the truth. However, St. Thomas is only a man: some years of thought after twelve centuries of Christianity and how many of civilization? Nonetheless, he understood better than anyone before him the essential truths, those which are first and most fundamental, and he knew how to build everything upon them, into a synthesis which is all the more open to every truth precisely inasmuch as it is more dependent upon a metaphysics, that is, on the principles of all things. Something very new and very crucial began with him in Christianity. In him and through him, Christian thought succeeded in arriving at a synthesis with the philosophy issuing from pure reason, such as it appeared in Aristotle. How could those who do not believe in the truth of this philosophy, those who do not believe that up to then theology lacked its perfect instrument, attach to Saint Thomas the importance that we attach to him? We feel how hard it is for modern thought to affirm that this philosophy is true and, consequently, capable of progressing, of extending itself, and of assimilating into itself everything that is true, while nonetheless remaining itself on account of the permanence of the principles which define it. If it is true, how many things are false! Yes, even theses that are permitted and taught in the Church. However, the Church only enforces an opinion concerning that which is De fide or very immediately connected to faith. Thank goodness! For were this not so, who would be orthodox? “Justice and truth are two points which are so subtle that our instruments are too blunt for us to be able to touch them with accuracy. If they reach it, they conceal the point of it and press in every direction, more upon falsity than upon truth” (Pascal, Pensées, no.82 of the Brunschvicg edition).
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First, though, let me point out something that we cannot discuss, though it drives me crazy about Thomists when they talk about human knowledge. Remember that practical (both technical and moral agency) is ultimately ordinative knowledge: the artisan’s / artist’s primary act of knowing is the judgment formed concerning the guiding idea for the work to be done; in moral activity, command is the perfection of prudential activity. In both cases, though, the intellect plays the role of being an extrinsic formal cause (though, of course, dependent on knowledge that is speculatively received, for we are not God). This whole domain of knowledge is something usually brushed aside, I feel, by Thomists, likely for a number of historical reasons. It represents, nonetheless, an entire domain of discussion to which great light can be brought precisely through Thomist principles.
But…. Okay… That will only be somewhat in the background, though primarily, our register here will be very overview level of discussion—and even then, quite complex. Everything I say here can be backed up with references, but I ask for mercy from my interlocutors!
Knowledge, cognitio, exists even at the level of sensation. To sense is utterly different than to receive a form subjectively. The simple example, though one that actually contains a profound mystery belonging to the natural order, is to consider the difference between the warming of a cup and the sensing of warmth. Or, even, the difference between the warming of a hand and the sensation of warmth through touch (or, through the common sense, or imagination, or memory, or estimation—though, remember, that the latter three in particular are far more elaborated and involve significant amounts of expression [species expressa sensitiva] in addition to the mere reception of forms). But, stay at the level of external sensation. Right there, even though you have a presupposed physical action (heating, light irradiating, etc.), there is a world of difference between a pool of water reflecting the light and the sense of sight knowing colored light. (Mind you, mere sensation of light is somewhat like the blur of a drug-induced state. The internal senses help in the elaboration of knowledge that enables even the animal to negotiate this world.)
The form is received into a sense, (and this is important:) precisely as a sense power, in a way that is not fully material. The reception of a form in such a way that the alterity of the other AS OTHER remains is different than the reception of a form so that the other makes the receiver ITSELF BECOME OTHER. In sensation, the knower BECOMES THE OTHER; in warming (or reflecting) the recipient BECOMES OTHER. You can’t reason to this distinction illatively. You can only try to defend it, for it represents, in my opinion, an example of a primary distinction and something per se nota. The essay in Garrigou’s Philosophizing in Faith on knowledge as becoming the other as other defends this with brilliant radiance. In particular, see the dense but beautiful passage from John of St. Thomas on pages 69-71.
To receive a form so that you appropriate it wholly AS YOUR OWN is material reception or subjective reception of the form (again, in this very simplified example: warmth into the skin and light into water [or even physically into the eye]). To receive a form such that the activity specified thereby involves BEING THE OTHER AS OTHER: this is reception that is intentional or objective. Since it is, in a way, not material, it is even called immaterial by Aquinas and, indeed, spiritual.
Let’s put this on its own line:
If you deny this distinction, you blur the distinction between knower and non-knower. Ultimately, I believe, your account of sense realism will take on some form of materialism, but that is not our issue here.
To this end, though, it is utterly inexplicable to me (and, downright pernicious) that someone like Eleanor Stump writes, in Aquinas (Routledge, 2003), 254: “The spiritual reception of sensible species is a change in the matter of the bodily organ of the sense.” Go and compare that claim with what you find in Yves Simon’s works on sensation. You’ll see in the latter a profound analysis of sensation. I have learned immensely more by being in the tutelage of those who were formed by the Thomist school than I have from Anglophonic analytics who are not part of the tradition. Alas, though, most of academia scorns the tradition because of its limitations. Might I quote someone dear to my heart, from an essay that will be in a volume soon to be published by CUA press by the American Maritain Association: “If we won’t listen to ‘secondary sources’ like Cajetan, Poinsot, Garrigou-Lagrange, Maritain, and Simon, why should anyone listen to secondary sources like us?” Certain academics should bear that in mind. One of the reasons I do so much translating work is precisely because… well… despite what tenure committees may think in contemporary academia…. There was much that was thought of before us that was far better than what we would come up with merely from our own quills.
Okay…. Let me get down of that soap box.
Worth reading to this end would be the following:
The opening of Yves Simon’s Metaphysics of Knowledge; his essay “To Be and to Know” in Philosopher at Work (this might be the clearest); the sensation essay in the latter volume of collected essays (though, truth be told, this is a very difficult essay). Also, there was Deely’s “The Immaterial of the Intentional as Such” in The New Scholasticism back in 1968. There were scads of articles written on this in the late 1990s and early 2000s. However, they all strike me as analytic philosophers (or philosophers trained by analytics) all trying to reinvent the wheel. I have very little patience for that, though I understand that it’s just the way that things are in academic culture. I cite this all in a very lengthy footnote in Philosophizing in Faith on pages 41 and 42.
Oh, take this home too, though. It means that precisely as knowledge (though not as sense knowledge), sensation already contains a pure perfection that can be analogically applied, in the final analysis, even to God. The world is full of hidden reflections of His transcendent majesty…
Once this distinction is made, however, we have what is needed for later domains of knowledge. For the internal senses, I always recommend the work of John Deely, Intentionality and Semiotics, though some of his theory is a bit quirky and tied up with other concerns of his. Moreover, look up in the index to my recent work the great work done by Daniel De Haan on perception of moral / action-related realities through the estimative / cogitative internal sense. Here, remember the important distinction between impression and expression. There is a great deal of elaboration that goes on once you begin to traverse the powers of imagination, memory, and estimation / cogitation. (The latter—memory and e/c—are quite elaborated. Remember, too that the memory holds past intentions primarily as coming from the estimative sense. Again, again, again…. This is something under-stressed by Thomists, given how scattered it is throughout the works of Aquinas. It’s why the school is necessary—not as an answer book, but as collaborators. What other discipline does not develop?! It drives me mad, for it reduces Thomism to (ultimately) relativistic historical digging around in texts, not a vital concourse with the truth of reality. But…. I digress… As you can see, I get on this hobby horse a lot.)
In intellectual knowledge, you have even more ways of being objectively united to the known: through simple apprehension (giving rise to definitions), in enunciation/judgment (complex combinations of notions), and in reasoning. Each of these are unique ways of objectively uniting to the other as other—though, here, in human intellection, we have the vital underpinning of being. Allow me to quote something of mine published in the very tiny journal _Maritain Studies._
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With intellectual life, we have a case of the same sort of objective reception of forms. But as specifically intellectual, it is an objective union brought about under the radiation of a new and higher light, being understood in its full breadth. The famed scholastico-Avicennian adage is, “Ens est illud quod primo cadit in cogintio humana,”[1] or, to follow the famed text from q. 1, a. 1 of St. Thomas’s Quaestiones disputatae de veritate, “Being is what the intellect first conceives, as it were, as what is most evident, and all of its conceptions are resolved into that of being.”[2] Immediately in the first intellectual apprehension of being,[3] we also find ourselves faced with the fact that every being is self-identical (i.e., the per se nota grasp of “the principle of identity”), and also with the “logical face”[4] of this self-identity, namely the fact that one and the same thing cannot both be and not be at the same time in the same respect (i.e., the per se nota grasp of the “principle of non-contradiction”).[5] In other words, in light of being and the very first principles that rule every judgment, the human intellect proceeds forward in light of being (and hence, too, of non-being to the degree that it is implied in the principle of non-contradiction). To know intellectually—to objectively be the other intellectually—is to know what it is that something cannot not be. It is to “see” the difference between the per se and the per accidens, and to lift out of the flow of change and practical concerns the essences of things. To live intellectually is to live in the domain of being and non-being. Even in the order of practical cognition this is so—though, in such cases it is also about effectively bringing about new being (in esse morale et artificiale).[6] The human person does not merely know some end to be accomplished—as is the case for the estimative sense. He knows the end as an end,[7] seeing it in light of the good in general such that it is obvious that there is a distinction between this end as an end and the various means by which one can achieve this end. It is this knowledge that lies close to the root of the will’s dominating indifference toward any finite good. It is whence springs the “inventiveness” of prudence, a “tactical [virtue], at once supple like the changing matter of human acts, all the details of which it registers and weighs out, and rigid like the first principles of moral actions,”[8] as well as the infinite creativity of the artistic judgment.
In other words, in intellectual life we are faced with what we could call “a way of being within being.” Under the light of the first principles, the scope of human apprehension considers not merely that which is of use for the practical life of human life (like the estimative sense of lower animals) but, rather, is concerned with the necessary and essential nature of all things and activities, a perspective rendered possible precisely because of the light of the first principles. To live intellectually is to be capable of a real kind of communion within the halls of being, on the one hand living off the infinite resources of the being of things, and on the other hand being capable of freedom in the true sense, dominating all particular choices and imparting meaning to the world. There is a radical capacity for, not creation, but at least creativity in the light of being. Such a way of objective union is indeed like the case of sense life, yet it is infinitely different
[1] Aquinas, De trinitate, q. 1, a. 3, obj. 3. For a good outline of the various uses and interpretations of this adage in Aquinas, see John F. Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas: From Finite Being to Uncreated Being (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2000), 41-42n56-60.
[2] Aquinas, De veritate, q. 1, a. 1.
[3] Truth be told, this first apprehension occurs in the quiddities of sensible things, the proper object of our intellect in the state of union with the body. Thus, it is not at first full disengaged metaphysically qua being, which is the adequate object of our intellect. Rather, our intellect’s proper object is grasped in terms of being that changes (i.e., at the first degree of abstraction). Our intellect’s proper object implies its adequate object, which can be known mediately and analogically, thus meaning that a fully metaphysical apprehension of being is possible. This is very well summarized by Fr. Austin Woodbury, whose works are deeply indebted to Maritain, Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange, and in this particular matter (as in others) to rather technical points taken from John of St. Thomas. See Woodbury, Natural Philosophy, Psychology, nos. 904-906, 936-938. On the distinction between the intellect’s proper object and its adequate object, see Garrigou-Lagrange, The Sense of Mystery, 146-147n6.
[4] In the principle of identity, we are first focused on the self-identity of the thing under consideration. However, because of the weakness of the human intellect, we grasp this identity only through the activity of thinking that requires us to see that a given thing is not something else from a given perspective, thus involving the principle of non-contradiction. One might even say that the principle of identity is first quoad se, whereas the principle of non-contradiction is more knowable and evident quoad nos. On this, see Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Le sens commun: la philosophie de l’être et les formules dogmatiques, 4th ed. (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1936), 165n1: “Cardinal Zigliara (in De lumière intellectuelle, vol.3, 255), like Suarez, follows more faithfully the letter of Aristotle’s text by according primacy to the principle of contradiction, but, he adds: ‘[The principle of contradiction] does not, however, [have primacy] with regard to the nature of the principles in themselves. Rather, [it has primacy] from the perspective of our [human] way of proceeding and on account of the great weakness of the human intellect.’” A translation of Sens commun is expected to be published in the near future by Emmaus Academic.
One variously finds Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange speaking of the principle of non-contradiction (or “the principle of contradiction”) as being the “logical face” of the principle of identity. Also, see Jean-Hervé Nicolas, Synthèse Dogmatique: de la Trinité à la Trinité (Fribourg, CH: Éditions Universitaires, 1985), 11 and 119.
[5] These principles are not deduced from one another through objective inference but are rather seen to be necessary through a reductio ad absurdum, which shows that one cannot deny one principle without implying the denial of the other (though without directly inferring the one from the other through a middle term). For a detailed discussion of the interrelations among the first principles, one can profitably consult Garrigou-Lagrange, Sens commun, 157-191. While I personally believe Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange provides a strong case regarding these matters, I’m not insensitive to the disagreements and difficulties among even Thomists on this matter. For sane counsel of humility concerning this matter, see Étienne Gilson, Wisdom and Love in Saint Thomas Aquinas (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1951), 21-25.
[6] On this latter point, see Matthew K. Minerd, “Beyond Non-Being,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 91, no. 3 (20017): 353-379.
[7] See ST I-II, q. 6, aa. 1 and 2. Also, see Garrigou-Lagrange, Sense of Mystery, 7-8.
[8] Ambroise Gardeil, “Intelligence and Morality,” trans. Matthew K. Minerd, Nova et Vetera 16, no. 2 (Spring 2018): 663.
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This is a ton, I know. But, the important point to remember is this: the thing that unites all of these forms of knowledge is the union that happens through the objective reception of forms. The problem of “realism” generally speaking calls for one to address the defense of first principles on the one hand and, on the other, the defense of sense realism on the other. (Simon shows, quite openly, how difficult the other is.)
I hope, on some level, all of this has been an aid. It represents the rambling coming from my mind, though based upon many years of meditating on these matters and, likewise, no small amount of professional work thereupon. (Indeed, the whole distinction between objective / intentional and subjective reception of forms provides the entire interpretive key for the work of Hervaeus Natalis on which I wrote my dissertation.
All the best to you and yours this Christmas Season!
Peace,
Matthew
(Aside, regarding the distinction between scire and cognoscere at the level of intellectual cognition, see if you are so interested, note 83 in my “Thomism and the Formal Object of Logic.” This will also be discussed at much greater length in an article that I will have in Nova et Vetera later this year.)