A Prolegomenon Concerning the Objectivity of Second Intentions, Part 1
I recently taught logic in a seminar format to the first year students at the Byzantine Catholic seminary in Pittsburgh. Funny enough, this was the first time I ever had to teach logic as a professor, despite the fact that my doctoral dissertation was devoted to the topic of the metaphysics of logic. The course format was somewhat strange, due to the novelty of our philosophy program in the Ruthenian cursus of formation. Therefore, I got to experiment a bit using a number of different sources to pull together a course that was mostly lecture based, with only some exercises. But one of the positive upshots to the experience was the fact that it forced me to try to teach some topics that I have wanted to press my own boundaries concerning. The fruit of that will eek out over the next year amid my various postings on To Be a Thomist.
But something strikes me, immensely whenever I discuss the topic of logic, even among those Thomists with whom I have had extensive correspondence regarding the nature of the subject of logic and its particular mode of abstraction. Outside of Dr. James Bryan, a close intellectual friend, I often find that I must revisit this topic over and over when I attempt to explain some point to people regarding the nature of logic as a science. This leads me to desire to write a brief “prolegomenon concerning the objectivity of second intentions.”
The Need to Articulate Various Kinds of Objectivity
Every discipline should begin with at least some initial discussion of the particular objectivity that belongs to the subject matter under consideration. I’m using the expression “objectivity” in a specific, technical sense. In the wake of the modern problems of epistemology, and especially during the initial period of leonine scholasticism, it has been a significant temptation for many, scholastic thinkers to focus upon the problem of realism so much so that the primary concern that many people have, really even up to this very day, is to validate the fact that the human mind can reach reality and articulate it. Often, this leads to the collapsing of a very important distinction, emphasized ad nauseum by my own “teacher at a distance,” John Deely (though used by many earlier Thomists and many of John’s students), namely the distinction between a thing as a thing and a thing as an object. I cannot revisit this topic here in detail. It is of pivotal importance, however, no matter what the nay-sayers who look askance at Deely might think. In any case, whenever I use the term “reality” hereafter, I am generally speaking in the register of “res” or “thing.” You will see why this is important below.
Human knowers do not experience the world like a kind of passive slate receiving intellectual impressions. In the act of cognition, we bring to bear an entire process of observation, definition, etc. by which we attempt to render reality not only actually intelligible but also actually intellected. There is an entire spiritual labor involved in our cognitional grasp of the world. (And in the practical order, this labor is joined by a volitional effect that is important as well, although outside of our concerns in this article.) The purpose of this labor is to render the reality in question, which has entered our awareness, fully articulated, so that we might be objectively united with it, united according to that particular mode of existence that pertains to knowledge, namely, a union with the other precisely as other, the other as an object. In other words, even if there is labor (or “production”) in knowledge, this labor is one thing, and knowledge is another (though the production is wholly subservient to such knowledge and not separable from it). (For this reason, Thomists – following in the line of John of St. Thomas – would say that such knowledge is virtually productive, although cognition itself is formally a kind of objective union. It requires the production of an interiorly manifested presentative form, an “intelligible species” and an articulated spiritual expression of knowledge, an “internal word,” but these function solely as means—quo et in quo—by which and in which we attain the reality thus objectified, the reality thus known).
In order for reality to become an object, therefore, an entire apparatus of human knowing must deploy itself. For example, we must define our terms within a given discipline, and the way that we define these terms will reflect a particular focus upon reality, in other words, a particular kind of abstraction. I prefer, however, to think of such “abstraction” not merely as a kind of “drawing forms from particulars” but, most importantly, as a kind of “intellectual visualization.” (I am here drawing on the somewhat cumbersome language of Maritain, when he speaks of “eidetic visualization” – not in the sense used by the phenomenologists, though not wholly detached from their concern regarding the constitution of objects. Likewise, no doubt, there are similarities with the notion of insight in someone like Lonergan, but his own philosophical apparatus is a kind of sui generis amalgamation of many sources, thus rendering it somewhat difficult to enter into immediate dialogue with, without thereby involving a huge labor of comparison, contrasting, criticism, and rapprochement.)
In any event, however, it is very important for us to realize the peculiarities of the unique focus of a given discipline. Allow, if I might, two examples, one from the natural order, and one from the supernatural order. On the level of natural knowledge, every form of scientism (indeed, any form of reductionism) arises from a failure to see that a limited domain of knowledge does not extend to the full breath of the beings that we encounter in our natural, cultural, moral, etc. lives. It is necessary that someone who truly has a strong grasp of his or her science have a very clear awareness of the delimitation of his or her subject matter, and the particular manner of defining reality involved therein. (We could call this the “intellectual asceticism of abstractive awareness.”) It is very important, for example, to consider motion and change precisely under the aspect of quantifiable observability. And we might even be able to say that there are various ways of considering such quantifiability. But, in any case, this will be very different from how one considers motion and change precisely in terms of the being of such becoming-change, that is, as a question pertaining to natural philosophy, let alone the broader domain in which such change is one analogate of being as such, namely the domain of metaphysics.
Similarly, we could consider theological science to be a kind of anthropology of the human condition, faced by grace. This would not, perhaps, represent a kind of naturalization of theology. But it would be a kind of restriction of its domain, and it would ultimately define its terms in view of the effects of grace within the human aspiration for transcendence, answered most profoundly in Christ. It would be, in the end, a manner of objectifying the data of revelation such that it risks foreclosing the more profound core of the supernatural message: the Triune God, whose transcendence is revealed in itself and not merely as the terminus of supernaturalized human desire and striving. (In distinction from the natural example above, however, I do not think it is possible to establish an independent theological anthropology that would stand outside of the traditional framework of a Trinitarian-centric theological science. Instead, a theological anthropology finds its native soil in the unified theological edifice that has the Trinity as its keystone. However, this is not the place to argue that point.)
Perhaps one more example in the supernatural order might help. The theological virtue of faith is concerned with an intimate acceptance of the revealed message, presented by God through the objective mediacy of the Church. When scholastic theologians say that its purpose is to assent, they do not mean that we have to grit our teeth and assent. Rather, they mean that faith is ultimately this personal (supernaturalized) reception of the hidden (supernatural) message revealed by God, concerning His tri-personality and His loving designs in history, including our personal histories. Theological explication, precisely as explication, involves something new, a new focus, namely the quest for some understanding of what is known by faith, some “intellectus fidei.” Therefore, we can say that the objectivity—that is, the “formal object”—of faith and of theology differ, even if it is completely clear that the latter draws its primordial and most constitutive light from the former. Still, there are different manners of objectivizing here. It would be dreadful for the theologian to replace personal faith with theological ratiocination. (To do so would be to transmute faith merely into a kind of talking about God, rather than a receptive posture of enabling us to spiritually speak the Triune message that the Triune God speaks to us, to enter into the intimacy of God’s own knowledge, interpersonally, to spiritually “speak God to God.”) And so too, it would be disastrous for him or her to loosen the rigor of theological thinking and rely upon faith, without duly signaling that he or she is doing so. (To do so would be to steal divine authority in order to buttress one’s own supposed reasoning.)
In other words, we must be very honest, all the time, with very clear awareness, concerning the noetic status of whatever object is under consideration. There are many formal objects, specifying many different powers, habits, and acts—and therefore, also, specifying many different sciences, most certainly I would say many more sciences than were suspected at the time of the great medieval and baroque doctors, though they have left us tools to articulate these different sciences. (I here, again, show myself to be an intellectual heir of Simon and Maritain, regarding the formal-objective differentiation of sciences over the course of history.)
Because of this fact, we can’t take for granted that the particular viewpoint, or better yet, the particular objectivity of a science is readily understood by those who are beginning to learn that discipline. Any science involves a great labor merely to isolate its particular concern from the great miasma of immediate data of common-sense perception. Our common and general awareness of the world is immersed in becoming-mobility, marked by all sorts of sensually perceptible and materially localized aspects, and often colored by a haze of emotions and affective responses which project our own interior reality out on to the world without our reflective awareness of this fact. All of this must be disentangled, and it must then be subjected to a particular kind of intellectual visualization.
Such a process is quite difficult, and it can take centuries for a given discipline to constitute itself in a fully articulated and differentiated fashion. Indeed, it is probably a rare occasion for this to be done with complete precision, without overlapping various domains of knowledge unknowingly. Again, we could think of the many forms of reductionism that continue to haunt the mind today. Psychology would be reduced to biology, which would be reduced to chemistry, which would be reduced ultimately to mathematical physics. And even if various disciplines do indeed attempt to maintain their boundaries, think about how difficult it is to distinguish just what is properly psychological from what is properly biological, at least as regards human and animal biology. One of the great tasks of intellectual culture that will face us until our last day upon earth will be the labor of articulating such boundaries. In other words, it will be the labor of articulating the formal object, and primary subject of attribution, of given sciences.
This is an important task for philosophy (and also for theological science), and I’m convinced that it is precisely here that phenomenology offers its best resources for attempting to articulate the various kinds of objectification that reality can be subject to. I’m aware that in saying this I am claiming nothing that is earth shattering. And yet, it is important to understand that this is in the background of what I will be talking about as I continue this series. My primary focus and training is scholastic. And hence, it will be “metaphysical” and “scientific” in bent, whether I am functioning at the level of the natural or that of the supernatural. But, I think that phenomenology provides an indispensable and irreplaceable articulation of the objectification of reality. (Here, I am deeply indebted not only to my former professor Msgr. Sokolowski and to random reading over the years, but most especially to many conversations with Dr. James Bryan.)
Therefore, all that I have heretofore said is a kind of prolegomenon to my prolegomenon. In the following articles, I will briefly attempt to tease out the experience of what the scholastic tradition came to call “second intentions,” namely, the particular kind of relations that we can intellectually form as we speculate about things which we have objectified for the sake of knowledge (particularly speculative knowledge, though perhaps not exclusively so). In other words, I will attempt to present the particular kind of objectivity involved in these “relations of reason” (relationes rationis) that are naturally formed by our intellects as we cognize the world and form definitions, statements, and syllogisms. My hope is that this can present at least a model for a more developed form of introduction to classical logic texts, which would be greatly improved if they were clearer precisely concerning the given objectified reality that they are discussing, that is if they were clearer about the formal object and primary subject of their scientific discourse.
(À suivre)
