A Prolegomenon Concerning the Objectivity of Second Intentions, Part 2

Introduction

In the first part of this prolegomenon, I laid out some of the basic framework for the overarching purpose of this series of articles. In the present article, I merely wish to lead the reader to the appropriate experience that hopefully will isolate the reality of second intentions in general. In other words, the present article is concerned with achieving the appropriate formal abstraction necessary for understanding and defining the various kinds of second intentions in more specific detail. The latter, detailed consideration will be the subject of the next three articles.

It is important to realize that the abstraction involved in logic is actually quite difficult. Of course, anybody who has taught a formal logic class already has a sense of this fact. However, the needs of good intellectual discipline have created the requirement that we teach logic early in philosophical formation: one must have one’s tools in hand before setting to work intellectually. Nonetheless, as St. Thomas Aquinas notes in De Trinitate q. 6, a. 1, sol. 2, ad 3:

It must be said that in teaching, we begin from that which is easier—unless necessity requires something else. Indeed, sometimes it is necessary in teaching to begin not with that which is easier but with that from whose knowledge depends the knowledge that will follow. And for this reason, it is necessary in teaching to begin with logic. This is not because logic is easier than the other sciences. Indeed, it has the greatest difficulty since it is concerned with things understood secondarily [lit. de secundo intellectis]. Instead, it is necessary to begin in teaching with logic because other sciences depend upon it (inasmuch as it teaches the manner of proceeding in all the sciences). As is said in the second book of the Metaphysics, it is first necessary to know the mode of science before knowing science itself [bold emphasis added].

John of St. Thomas expresses this difficulty in his material logic by noting the fact that logic is at the third degree of abstraction. It is not as abstract as metaphysics, nor as supernatural theology, but it nonetheless deals with realities that are non-material in important and essential ways.¹

This article will attempt to lead the reader to this appropriate kind of abstraction concerning these realities (what will come to be called “second intentions,” a very specific kind of relation, naturally formed by the intellect in its labors of knowing). The apparatus of the later Thomistic logic and metaphysics will be in the background of my mind as I write this. Nonetheless, I hope to use examples that can draw one in by force of the intellectual operation of such abstraction itself. I will therefore present only a small number of footnotes.

To Be an Intention

Let’s begin with the word “intention.” It is an ambiguous term, especially to the mind that is familiar with the history of philosophy. This term might refer to a particular act of will by which we have determined that we shall strive after a given end through an as-yet-indeterminate series of means. Or, perhaps, someone who is apprised of certain ways of speaking, found among Scholastics and phenomenologists in the line of Brentano and Husserl, will use the expression “intention” to refer to a particular sort of intellectual operation or product, by which the mind “stretches out toward” (in+tendere) a reality to be grasped. Finally, one might even recall having read summary accounts of Aristotle’s Categories and Porphyry’s Isagoge, recalling the idea of a “first intention” (e.g., animal) in contrast to a “second intention” (genus). This last sense will be the point of departure for our considerations. As we will see, this kind of “intention” is a known reality: “intention” in this sense is on the borders of being and knowing.²

Let us begin by considering the example of our knowledge of the insect ant. In light of the principle of non-contradiction, we can at least say that whatever is ant is not non-ant. An intellectual grasping of the notion ant puts us in touch with some at-least-vaguely-grasped essence that we perhaps wish to define. There are various things that we might say about ants, depending on how much we know (or on how ignorant we are about their way of life). Thus, we might come to describe ants as black or red, sensate or subterranean, as insects, animals, living beings, or physical substances. In all of these cases of knowledge, the objects of our consideration are realities that have an independence from our apprehension.³ Whether or not we happen to be deceived about the particular existence of this or that ant, nonetheless when we attempt to define intellectually what an ant is, the concepts that we use aim at defining an essence that is not of our making, but, rather, is something to be discovered and, so to speak, respected. Thus, based upon sundry experiences, our mind formulates such knowledge, identifying aspects of reality that are, in some way,⁴ mind-independent, essential notes that we seek to discover and use for the sake of grasping a reality that is not of our own devising: black, red, sensate, subterranean, insect, physical substance…. Were there no human mind, ant would be opposed to non-ant, black to non-black, subterranean to non-subterranean, etc.

But, as humans, we seek to explain the essential borders of each of these notions. When we deploy such cognitional activity, we do not seek to articulate what things are merely for us. Rather, in this sort of purely speculative cognition,⁵ we seek to articulate what realities are, what things are in their essential natures, that inflexible notional backbone that is hinted at in the primordial opposition of ant to non-ant. Our focus is on the reality in question and the characteristics of that reality: what ants are… what subterranean beings are… etc.

But, let us now notice the important implication of this word “intention.” To say that something is a “first intention” is somewhat akin to saying that it is “a primary and immediate object of knowledge of realities that are mind-independent,” or “a primarily cognizable, mind-independent reality that is known by a human.” To be known by a human is not a property of ant. But, when ant comes to be an object of knowledge, we can say that it is a “first intention.”

This is of capital importance: to be an intention implies that a reality (res) has become an object (obiectum) of knowledge. The reader who is familiar with John Deely and his followers will immediately recognize this distinction (which has an older scholastic pedigree).⁶ However, one does not need to be a “semiotic Thomist” to appreciate this point. What is important here is to recognize that when I say, “insect is a first intention,” I am saying something about insect that has a kind of two-faced nature: at once, I am declaring that the notion of insect is something that articulates a mind-independent reality (hence, the “first” in “first intention”). I am also stating, simultaneously, however, that this reality is an object of knowledge—something aimed at by the mind’s cognitional intention toward it (hence “intention” in “first intention”).

Because many readers of scholastic thinkers focus heavily on the “cognitional intention” of the intellect toward its object, I must state this again: to be an intention, in the sense that is critical for our logically-inflected concerns here, is something that I say of a mind-independent reality that is, however, known. These words are precisely chosen and written: insect is a first intention. In other words, the mind-independent reality (res, not in the sense of “individual natural thing,” but, rather, in the full scope of the term “reality”⁷) that is insect now has a relation to a knower. According to scholastic terminology such a relation is a relation of reason (relatio rationis). But all we need to appreciate for now is the fact that this res presently has a characteristic that does not belong to it solely as a res. It is now an intention, a first intention, a primordial object of intellectual knowledge. And, interestingly enough, this relatio rationis from insect to the knower, from any res to a knower, is what 14^th century scholastics called intentionality: not the mind “stretching out toward the known object” but, rather, the new relation formed in the act of cognition, making the reality (e.g., insect, sensate, black, etc.) an object.⁸

New Characteristics: Second Intentional Relationes Rationis

Under these new conditions, namely, the conditions of being an object of speculative cognition, known realities, precisely as known, take on new characteristics. Thus, one and the same nature, known as ant, insect, and animal, can also give rise to the following sorts of attributions: “insect is a genus (in relation to ant)”; “ant is a species (in relation to insect)”; etc. In reality itself, we don’t experience a species or a genus. These are not, strictly speaking, essential characteristics or properties of mind-independent realities. Instead, they are relations that realities take on precisely by being known and variously rendered an object in different manners (e.g., as ant, insect, etc.).

Because such characteristic relations, genus and species in our example here, pertain to things only in so far as they are known, they are so to speak one step away from primary reality. For that reason, they are called “second intentions.”

In order slowly to build up over the course of several more articles the way that our mind forms and understands these sorts of “second intentions,” it is essential to consider the parenthetical remark that I made above concerning genus and species. Note well, that, in both cases what we there grasp is that the object of knowledge, e.g. insect, has a relation to another object of knowledge, e.g., ant. In other words, these two objects (in the classical scholastic sense of objects noted above, what we might call “objectified realities”) are—precisely as objects of knowledge—subject to a new kind of relation that only exists precisely because the mind has thoughtfully discovered and devised this relation amid its labors of attempting to define what an ant is.⁹

Precisely as realities, ants can be the subject of relations as well. For example, one ant can be bigger than another. This would be a “real predicamental relation,” founded on quantity but itself a unique accident. But, as soon as we consider ant no longer solely as a reality (“ut res) but precisely as an object of intellectual knowledge (ut obiectum), ant all of a sudden is able to take on new characteristics, new relations which make up the warp and woof of our speculative cognitional life. However, these characteristics imply something about the very power that has “objectified” this reality, namely the intellect in its speculative operation.

The Intellect Weaves Three Broad Kinds of Second Intentions

When things become objects of knowledge in this way, therefore, they take on an entire new world of characteristics as the mind attempts to pass from what it already knows to what it does not yet know but what it seeks to articulate. Each and every one of these kind of relationships will be called a “second intention.” They are relations (relationes rationis) formed by the intellect naturally in the course of its speculative operation. These different kinds of relations will be qualitatively different, depending on the kind of activity of intellection involved in forming these different kinds of relations. In its speculative operation, the intellect has three great domains of activity: definition formation, statement and judgment expression, and syllogistic reasoning.

Each one of these activities involves a unique way of expressing knowledge. When we form definitions, we seek to express simple essences of things. We present to our mind a genus and a difference, attempting to distinguish reality at its essential joints. When we form statements, we take products from this activity of definition and we weave them together into complex wholes, made up of subject and predicate, with a certain quantity and quality expressed therein. As the scholastics often say: we thereby compose and divide our notions. Thus, for example, we say, “Some insect is a subterranean creature.” Here, insect takes on a new kind of second intention, a new kind of relation (in this case to subterranean creatures): namely a subject in a proposition that has a positive quality and a particular quantity, here with a suppositio disiuncta). Finally, we combine together such statements into discourse. Thus: “Every subterranean creature fashions a habitat by means of tunnels. Some insect is a subterranean creature. Therefore, some insect fashions a habitat by means of tunnels.” In this case, subterranean creature, for example, takes on a new sort of relationship that it can only have as part of a syllogism: middle term.¹⁰

These different kinds of relationships are things that we naturally form, whenever we “intuitively” deploy our intellectual powers, naturally.¹¹ Whenever we are reasoning about reality, we don’t pay a lot of attention to these relations until we realize that we have to reflect on our intellectual labors in order to double check whether or not we are correctly approaching the reality under consideration. But when we reflect in this way, we then consider how our intellect weaves various relations between objects of knowledge precisely in so far as they are objects of speculative knowledge. We consider whether our definitions are as tight as they should be and are correctly formed. We reflect on whether or not we have considered the immediate implications¹² of a given proposition correctly. And we try to figure out whether or not our reasoning is valid and sound.

It is very important to realize that this kind of reflection is not a reflection on the philosophical-psychological aspect of our knowledge, as though we would be turning back to try to grasp the intellectual apparatus that has been deployed in our knowledge. Such psychological reflection is legitimate, and it is the way that we come to know about all of the things studied in the philosophical discussion “De anima et de intellectu.” However, logical reflection is directed precisely at the relations—called “relationes rationis” insofar as they are not purely “mind-independent” and predicamental, and called “second intentions” insofar as they are “one step removed” from mind-independent reality—which our intellect naturally forms, precisely because of its nature, as a discursive power.¹³ (To restate this point in brief: logical reflection involves formally isolating second intentional relations as objects of knowledge; philosophical-psychological reflection reflects upon the qualities and virtually transitive activities by which and in which we attain knowledge.)

The entire domain of second intentional relations will make up the subject matter of logic. At the end of these articles, I will return to this as a synthetic completion. But, in the next three articles, I will consider each of the acts of the intellect in its speculative operation and catalog some of the second intentions formed thereby. As we consider each of these domains, it will be very clear that such relations have their own properties. (For example, a genus is more extensive than a species.) Ultimately, logic is nothing other than the scientific art that explains the nature and properties of each of these relations which weave the fabric of our rational life.

(À suivre)

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1. See John of St. Thomas, Material Logic, trans. Yves Simon et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), q. 27, a. 1 (p. 562): “In logic, metaphysics, and theology, there is abstraction from both sensible and intelligible matter on the part of the term from which, but the modes of immateriality attained by these sciences are diverse. Theology considers God himself as known through the divine light of virtual revelation; metaphysics [considers everything it considers] under the first and supreme aspect of being, as abstracting both from createdness and uncreatedness. Logic considers [second] intentions as founded upon the objects known to our intellect; of themselves, these intentions have but a negative immateriality, since they are nothing real.” For my own engagement with second intentions,see Matthew K. Minerd, “Beyond Non-Being: Thomistic Metaphysics on Second Intentions, Ens morale, and Ens artificiale,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 91, no. 3 (July, 2017): 353–379.↩︎

2. I am taking the expression from the evocative and important book by John Doyle, On the Borders of Being and Knowing: Some Late Scholastic Thoughts on Supertranscendental Being, ed. Victor M. Salas (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2012).↩︎

3. One cannot defend all things at once. I presuppose a moderate realism here, as defended in very simple but profound form by someone like Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange in the essays I gathered in Philosophizing in Faith or by Maritain in ch. 3 of his Degrees of Knowledge. Likewise, one might profitably consider John Deely’s Intentionality and Semiotics.↩︎

4. I am here leaving the relevant issues connected to “realism” indeterminate for the sake of being as capacious as possible regarding the many noetic questions in the background here and cannot be addressed.↩︎

5. This qualifier is important, for I am trying to delimit our consideration to the purely speculative for the sake of clarity of exposition, allowing us to set aside the domains of art and morality for the time being.↩︎

6. See Jacques Maritain, Degrees of Knowledge, trans. Gerald Phelan et al. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002), 96–107, 127–36; John C. Cahalan, “The Problem of Thing and Object in Maritain,” The Thomist 59, no. 1 (1995): 21–46; L.-M. Régis, Epistemology, trans. Imelda Choquette Byrne (New York: Macmillan, 1959), 177–93. On the prehistory of the notion of object, some use can be drawn from consulting Lawrence Dewan, “‘Obiectum’: Notes on the Intention of a Word” in Wisdom, Law, and Virtue: Essays in Thomistic Ethics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 403–43.

   If I mention this topic quite frequently, this is because I have found that this distinction between res and obiectum remains not as heeded as it should be. As was once observed by Maritain distinction is, quoad nos, the most important distinction, just as, quoad se, the distinction between act and potency (and its signal case of the distinction between essence and existence) is in metaphysics.↩︎

7. Here, the more advanced reader can find related points in my brief article, “The Analogy of Res-ality,” Reality 1 (2020): 124–145.↩︎

8. This relation of intentionality from the known to the know is the very first of the second intentions, presupposed by all the others that follow. As we will see both below and in subsequent articles, there are, in fact, three species of such relations, in accord with the three general kinds of speculative acts that the intellect can engage in: defining, statement formation, and reasoning.↩︎

9. On the sense Thomas’s use of adinvenire in this matter, the reader should consult Marie-Dominique Philippe, “Originalité de ‘l’ens rationis’ dans la philosophie de Saint Thomas,” Angelicum 52 (1975): 91–124.↩︎

10. John of St. Thomas, for example, holds—and rightly it seems—that the intellect forms a distinct verbum for these different operations. The third, however, is still a statement and not a kind of “syllogistic verbum.” I have discussed this elsewhere. See John of St. Thomas, Cursus philosophicus thomisticus, ed. Beatus Reiser, vol. 3 (Naturalis philosophia, vol. 2) (Turin: Marietti, 1930), q. 11, a. 3 (esp. 372A7–373B17).↩︎

11. To this end, there are interesting things to be considered regarding the distinction between “logica utens” and “logica docens.” Related to this, though not quite the same, is the distinction between logica naturalis and logica artificialis. For some discussion, see Maarten J.F.M. Hoenen, “From Natural Thinking to Scientific Reasoning: Concepts of Logica naturalis and Logica artificialis in Late-Medieval and Early-Modern Thought,” Bulletin de philosophie médiévale 52(2010): 81–116. Also, for use in C.S. Peirce (who was indebted to various scholastics), Ahti-Veikko Pietarinen, “Cultivating Habits of Reason: Peirce and the Logica Utens versus Logica Docens Distinction,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 22, no.4 (Oct., 2005): 357-372; John of St. Thomas, Material Logic, q. 1, a. 5 (The Meaning of the distinction between doctrinal logic and logic in use).↩︎

12. I don’t say “immediate inferences” for the important reasons noted in Jacques Maritain, An Introduciton to Logic, trans. Imelda Choquette (London: Sheed and Ward, 1946), 162–169.↩︎

13. There are many other relationes rationis that our intellect can form. But, in classical terminology, one only speaks of “second intentions” for the sorts of relations we have been discussing in this article.↩︎