A Prolegomenon Concerning the Objectivity of Second Intentions, Part 6 (Conclusion: Intellectual Culture and the Preferencing of Rhetoric, Dialectic, or Science)

At¹ long last, we have arrived at the conclusion of this introductory study concerning the nature of logic’s formal object, primary subject of attribution, and some of its various particularized subjects. Our investigation has remained somewhat exploratory, marked by the tone befitting the “via inventionis,” in the hope of arousing intellectual insight into the very character of the objects under consideration. Now, by way of conclusion, I would like to make some final observations.

We cannot escape the structuring of our thought by way of second intentions. From the moment that intellectual activity begins its labors, transforming “mere things” into objects of knowledge,² we begin weaving the overall structure of definitions, statements, and some form of discursive reasoning. And all of these relations have an essential stability and property structure that suffices for a scientific discourse, the scientific art of logic. And such stability, such essential structure and intelligibility must be recognized and served, lest we find ourselves impelled by the internal demands of these very relations.

Allow me to explain what I mean, for the consequences are important for intellectual culture.

It is sometimes said that “people do not have ideas” but, rather, that “ideas have people.” This saying is meant to gesture in the direction of the very real phenomenon of ideological possession. Even more than the observation that “ideas have consequences,” we can even say that ideas have a kind of “nature,” that their intelligibility (sometimes distorted and “parasited” by an error) exercises causality³ on those who know these ideas, doing so in a way that is analogous to the causality exercised by “natures” in mind-independent reality.⁴ Ideologies and ideas themselves impel us—sometimes silently and sometimes in full knowledge of the facts—toward all of the elaborations and conclusions that follow from those ideologies and ideas.

The same can also be said regarding the essential structure of different kinds of logical intentions. One should pay heed to the warp and woof of relations uniting together the objects of one’s knowledge. If one is treating a subject matter rhetorically without any self-reflective logical criticism, one will be led, nolens volens, toward the treatment of a matter as though it were merely subject to rhetorical persuasion. The same could be said for dialectical or scientific reasoning. One must know the answer to the question: what is the “magnetizing” or “polarizing” force that animates the second intentional structure of one’s discourse?

This is, of course, an old question. It is, as it were, one of the great leitmotivs of the Platonic dialogues. If we were to allow ourselves to indulge in a bit of simplification, we could consider so much of the great Socratic struggle against sophistry to be, in fact, the struggle of contemplative dialectics against a corrupted and sophistical form of rhetoric. And the Aristotelian Posterior Analytics could be interpreted as being, on a particular reading (perhaps a bit Whiggish but not completely incorrect, I think), a purification of the foundational bent of the original Platonic Academy, a purification that gave dialectics a secondary place in view of fully articulated scientific discourse about the necessary and essential structure of realities, their properties, their proper effects, and so forth. And how could one not hear an echo of the so-called Decisive Treatise by Ibn Rushd, in which each of these discourses are assigned to various levels of conceptual ability: rhetoric to the general listeners of Quranic preaching; dialectics to the nonconclusive arguments between Asharite and Mutazilite theologians; and demonstrative science to the philosophically well-informed.

One must be very careful in these matters. Human reasoning universally makes use of rhetoric, dialectic, and science. Our discursive thought—that is, the thought brought about by the “third act of the intellect”—weaves a complex fabric of rhetorical, dialectical, and scientific second-intentional relations. The key question that we must ask ourselves is: which of these three should function as the center of “intellectual gravity”? In other words, which is subordinate to the other?

The answer seems to be clear to me, but I’m well aware that it is a contested claim: science (and especially sapientially oriented⁵ demonstration) is, de iure, the central pole of human reasoning. We desire to understand what things are, what are their properties, what are their proper effects, etc. Such a goal may well be nearly asymptotic at times—sometimes maybe even to the point that we think that it is utterly asymptotic, unattainable for mere human minds. Nonetheless, for those who think that the human intellect was created for the full breadth of being, it seems that it would be quite a cruel trick of human nature (and of God!) that our intellect would be at once oriented toward the per se, while never being able to attain it. The Christian philosopher will see here a kind of odd epistemic echo of theological claims regarding the supposed utter corruption of nature by the Fall: the human mind would definitively grasp only the beatific vision, but prior to that, our nature would at best be a kind of openness for the vision, in itself incapable of definitive knowledge of any other realities. I suppose that such a theory could also implicitly involve a kind of revivification of the old theories of divine illumination, which would be necessary in order to supply for the incapacity of human intellection outside the vision of God. But, the history of philosophy bears witness to the grave risks of ontologism or semi-ontologism that will need to be avoided in order to maintain an orthodox attempt at such cognitional theories. (But, in any event, such divine-illumination theorists will almost certainly thereby exempt themselves from calling themselves Thomists, for as they defend such an epistemology, they will be led to deny central principles of Thomistic thought.)

This is not, of course, meant to imply the scientific demonstration is some easy affair. In order to arrive at a demonstration, one must spend a great deal of time seeking out the appropriate experiential basis for knowing, in a sufficiently scientific manner, the facts and principles of one’s discourse. Very often—perhaps, even for generations—even before articulating true first principles, thinkers must work to discover first a property-derived definition and then, perhaps, even an essential definition of a given subject matter. Moreover, the “topical” analysis of genus, species, difference, property, and accident—that is, the work of dialectical reasoning—is a continually useful tool in pedagogy and “academic writing.” And when teachers present a discipline to students who are beginning on the paths of knowledge, it will be necessary that a kind of intellectual rhetoric be used in order to present difficult matters to those who are beginning on the paths of science. Traditionally, one speaks of “epideictic” rhetoric as regards the presenting of moral realities that are deserving of praise and blame. However, such epideictic exposition can also be a great use for presenting realities that are beyond the comprehension of the current scientific abilities of one’s listeners. But when such a dialectician or such a rhetorician engages in the topical labor of discovering the definition (or of manifesting it to a listener) and in the rhetorical work of presenting a great and profound reality so as to inflame one’s desire to truly understand it, if such a dialectician or rhetorician is ultimately “magnetized” by the desire to demonstrate the per se, then ultimately such dialectics and such rhetoric will be traversed by the intellectual élan animated by one’s ultimate telos of seeking out demonstrations quia and, above all, propter quid. Rhetoric and dialectic will be oriented toward the question: precisely (i.e., per se) why is this the case? That is: Probable certainty will be oriented toward demonstrative certainty, not toward mere probability, forever floating around, disconnected from definitive and stable truth, like an actuary with a probability table in hand but nothing else.

If I might be permitted a slight simplification, I would like to consider, by way of contrast, how a discipline could be altered by placing, instead, something like dialectics at the center of one’s logico-intellectual universe. One may claim: human reason is not strong enough to know and manifest the per se connections between realities, to manifest how it is that the essences of things explain their properties, etc…. At best, what we would be able to do—on this supposition—is reach probable certainty, a kind of inclination toward truth in the best cases, but always surrounded by the fear of error. One would be counseled, as the skeptics of old counseled their listeners, to keep looking into things (σκέπτεσθαι), forever restraining oneself from a definitive judgment.

One can be reminded of this sort of approach in a certain kind of “Great Books” understanding of philosophy. There may be definitively achieved texts, but whether or not there are definitively achieved demonstrations seems somewhat up in the air as regards such matters. Granted, it is quite wrong to treat philosophical certainty as though it has the same luminosity as a well formulated mathematical argumentation based upon mathematical middle terms. But it is another thing to treat the history of philosophy as though it were a narrative of positions that deftly nuance each other, but, ultimately, at best provide relative certainty, but little else. Thus, somewhat like a version of the Platonic Academy, especially in its later decadence, one would take up the great texts of the past and debate about them, learning the skill of humanely and humanistically being able to read thoughts of the past and weigh them against each other, assessing, greater or less truth, but not necessarily crossing the threshold of saying: this is a definitive acquisition, so much so that it is the demonstrative terminus that renders a number of other positions ultimately foolish and worthy not of appreciation but only of being disproven as errors, as pestilential claims that darken the mind.

Of course, I do not mean to say that all “Great Books” curricula are informed by a kind of studied skepticism, afraid of definitive assertions of the truth. But there is a risk in a broadly dialectical method that one’s reasoning will decline towards skepticism, for the prioritization of dialectic over science ultimately leads one to deny the possibility of true and solid demonstration, showing why something is per se the case, why it must be the case, why it cannot not be the case. The Academy of Plato gave rise to not only the Peripatetic school and also the mystical grandeur of later Neoplatonism; but it also gave rise to the later Academy and its skepticism. Dialectics that is magnetized by science holds the promise—even if rarely achieved—of definitive truth; but when left on its own, functioning as though it could be the loadstar of human intelligence, pure dialectics is a ready path toward eventual skepticism or rhetorical manipulation. Again, the history of the Platonic academy provides a kind of “intellectual laboratory confirmation” of this claim.

Something similar, of course, can take place in the supernatural order in theological speculation. The growth of positive theology was utterly important to the ongoing appreciation for the particular data and sources of theological reflection. To have a deep and rich appreciation of the various kinds of theological sources, of the various loci of theological principles and arguments, represents a methodological advance in the self-understanding of the task of achieving some intellectus fidei. However, when positive theology becomes the primary method for theological reflection, one experiences, here anew, the effects of “pan-probabilism” upon the warp and woof of theological reasoning. If such dialectics were placed squarely at the center of theological discourse, as its primary and most essential labor, the theological task could ultimately appear to be nothing other than a kind of cataloging of the certainty that can be attached to given demonstrations: is this formally revealed? Is it virtually revealed? Is such virtuality marked by the certainty belonging to the Fathers of the Church? To later theologians? Etc.⁶ And thus, one might well be able to make a claim that this or that theologian is more or less certain, more or less true seeming, but that will be as far as one will wish to go. And thus, for example, one might permit, as something de iure acceptable as a matter of intellectual certainty (and not merely de facto as regards the public conditions and permissions afforded to discourse), the supposed truthful coexistence of, at once, the Scotist formal distinction alongside the Thomist theory of Divine simplicity, or the Suarezian understanding of obediential potency alongside the Thomist one, or moral-causal explanations of sacramental causality alongside those that appeal to efficient-causal instrumentality, or the Scotist theory of adductive transubstantiation alongside Thomist conversive theories of transubstantiation.⁷ Theology would be a kind of cataloging of positions according to their certainty, and the dialectical methods of the De locis would become the very best we could hope for.⁸ And even if it might be a slight rhetorical flourish to say that this implies a kind of “theologian-ology” that replaces “theology,” nonetheless, I do think that as has been observed by others,⁹ there is a grave risk that one here applies a kind of probabilist method universally to the sources of theology. One learns to weigh authorities, to assign a kind of desiccated and mechanistic probability, stopping at the threshold of claiming that the per se can be definitively reached and demonstrated.¹⁰ Monograph after monograph can be written based on that method: Augustine on the nature of the Church, 11^th century Augustinians on the nature of the Church, the Victorines on the Church, John of St. Thomas on the Church, Gabriel Vasquez on the Church, Gabriel Biel on the Church, Protestant Augustinianism on the Church, Henri de Lubac on the Church, Augustine in Henri de Lubac on the Church…. It is very useful—utterly useful, completely necessary—to apply the methodologies laid out in the best of the tradition De locis,¹¹ but ultimately a Thomist’s intellectual culture will be averse—perhaps to the point of sometimes seeming “unfit” in the eyes of contemporary academic theology—to the endless historical-intellectual stamp collecting that arises from the logical preference for giving primacy to dialectics. The Thomist should rightly appreciate investigation into all the various loci; but, because the Thomist’s mind is ultimately magnetized by the demands of demonstrative logic, the Thomist will always most primordially desire to put such sources into the noble service of answering this sort of question: What in fact is the Church in her essence, her properties, her proper effects, etc? The thoughts of others about reality will not be what is most important. Reality—grasped, perhaps inchoately, perhaps in a partial fashion open to further work, but aiming for definitive articulation—will be what is most important.¹²

The intellect, however, desires certainty, and so it is very likely that a purely dialectical method will also make use of rhetoric. One desires to have a judgment that can be “clinched,” that can come to its rest in truth. This deserves repetition: the intellect seeks its rest in the truth. Therefore, the dialectically motivated reasoner, with arguments that remain probable,¹³ will still feel the need to make the leap into the arms of the true. Thus, a choice (a volitional act) will be necessary. However, a grave risk will remain: the will may be rectified… but it will be left to caprices that are subject to potential grave deviation. Certainty would pass over into volition, which alone could render our judgment terminal. The Thomist should hear the echoes of the practical order here being foisted upon the speculative. And such echoes should give one pause, for it is a grave epistemological error for one to confuse the truth of speculative intelligence with that of practical intelligence.

In the supernatural order, this is perhaps at first less problematic, for supernatural theology is born of faith, ideally of living faith. For that reason, the supernaturalized affect that guides the judgment of faith is essential for any worthwhile theology. And any theology that does not bear charity’s mark, animated by the gifts of the Holy Spirit, is lacking in the full perfection of the very insight of faith that must always guide the light of theological speculation. The theologian whose grasp of the truths of faith is unmarked by a living engagement with the Gifts is like the philosopher or scientist who only grasps his or her principles like a beginning student, without depth and without living animation.¹⁴

But, if there can be no per se certainty in the form of scientific theological speculation—even if achieved only after the expense of great labors—then the gulf of certainty will be filled by the will. This is completely normal in the domain of the theological virtues; and this is the same as saying: this is completely normal in what is most important. But when it comes to an explanatory discipline, it amounts to saying that there is no explanation, but at best, moral and spiritual exhortation, or at worst, sophistical manipulation.

Obviously, when it is subjectively oriented toward a desire for the truth, this sort of outlook has something noble to it. And truth be told, the application of knowledge to preaching, catechesis, and spiritual direction very often is animated precisely by this kind of “theological rhetoric.” It is like a Christian echo of what one finds embraced by some of the great Roman Stoics: real philosophy is living according to prudence; everything else is second or third tier. And a great patrimony of Christian speculation—especially when influenced by the ascetical and mystical traditions of Christianity—would ultimately place moral and spiritual exhortation at the heart of theological explanation. (And yet… Even in the Byzantine East, scientific theology also took root…) In fact, from the perspective of our personal destinies and the intrinsic teleology of the Christian life as lived through the theological virtues, this should always be considered the right order of things, given the supernatural and living source of the truth that animates discursive scientific theology. The principles of theology are always beyond the theologian and call, at once, for a kind of sacred rhetoric and for a continuous return to the Christian life of charity, by which God deepens our grasp of Him and His mysteries.

Yet, one must be well aware of what one is trading off: does the importance of rhetoric in such divine matters mean that we must set aside the hope of demonstrative knowledge to the degree that such knowledge is possible? And we might also ask: does the importance of the mediation of sources require us to remain, in the end, solely within the bounds of the probable? And if we were to consider the world of physical science: does the dialectical work of observation and correction of hypotheses and conclusions require us to say that there are no certain physical-scientific acquisitions (even if, indeed, such acquisitions are always subject to being somehow reworked and placed within a broader synthesis, as scientific discoveries deepen our understanding of the physical world¹⁵)?

Such questions must be asked, and the domains of discursive second intentionality must be considered in their relationships. One must determine the particular role to be played by rhetoric, dialectic, and scientific second intentional relations: which is central and served by the others?¹⁶ Obviously, there are some matters that can only call for dialectical or even rhetorical adjudication. It would be insane to expect a jury to wait for demonstrative science in order to reach a verdict. And even the individualized “practical syllogism” will always intrinsically depend upon the will (which is first, in the order of efficient causality) in order to reach its terminal judgment (which is first, in the order of extrinsic formal causality).

Nonetheless, one still must ultimately settle on an answer to this question: should we seek the per se to the degree that this is possible? Is the mind made for knowing what is necessary and why it is necessary, or is this merely the illusion of a kind of mathematical intelligence? If we say that it is indeed the life of the intellect to seek out the per se and distinguish it from the per accidens, then, we will find ourselves immediately upon the pathway of logic that will place at its center the logic of demonstration and the long tradition of Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics, doubtlessly deepened and expanded, yet also maintaining all of its classical structure. And if one does not accept this solution, then at the very least, one will be very well apprised of what has been decided upon when one relegates scientific certainty to a secondary status, instead placing dialectical or rhetorical certainty at the core of human discourse. And even if I—in line with the long Aristotelian tradition—might disagree with that choice, I can quite respect an interlocutor who at least recognizes the systematic requirements of such an interpretation of the data of intelligence and the framework of second intentions that structure our discourse. But, to thus choose dialectics or rhetoric as the pinnacle achievement of human intelligence would be, ultimately, to choose a path that would foreclose the possibility of calling oneself a Thomist.

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1. The intellectual trends decried on occasion in this essay are, I believe, real and influential within the warp and woof of intellectual culture, even if they are kinds of limit cases.↩︎

2. This was a point repeated several times in earlier essays in this study.↩︎

3. Technically, some form of “objective” causality, whether immediate or vicarious.↩︎

4. To the degree that an object of knowledge (here loosely and somewhat improperly being referred to as an “idea,” a term that was classically reserved to the fabricative idea of the artisan) can exercise this sort of causality, we can say that it is a kind of “principle of quasi-motion and rest,” namely in the “quasi-motion” of the human intellect specified by such an object. To this degree, it is somewhat like a nature, for nature connotes—beyond the notion of “form”—the character of being an inherent principal of motion and rest. Here, the object—rendered an object by the intellect—has a kind of “objective inclination” toward the full explication of all the consequences that follow from this object’s essence in esse intelligibile.↩︎

5. See Matthew K. Minerd, “Wisdom be Attentive: The Noetic Structure of Sapiential Knowledge,” Nova et Vetera (English edition) 18, no. 4 (Fall 2020): 1103–1146.↩︎

6. On this score, sometimes even the great Ambroise Gardeil can seem to reduce wayfaring theology to this task.↩︎

7. No amount of claims that such positions are “analogical” (an abusive use of the expression “analogy”) can make both of these various positions true at the same time. The reader surely notes that I am echoing, in effect, the concerns raised by Garrigou-Lagrange and, in essence, also echoed by M.-M. Labourdette and M.-J. Nicolas during the 1940s debate over truth and methodology, the texts of which are gathered together in Matthew K. Minerd and Jon Kirwan (eds.), The Thomistic Response to the Nouvelle Théologie: Concerning the Truth of Dogma and the Nature of Theology (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2023).↩︎

8. As Gardeil has recognized, building on the study by Mannès Jacquin (“Melchior Cano et la Théologie Moderne,” Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques 9 [1920]: 121–141), it was this general bent toward positive theology and the reduced “loci” of “Proof from Scripture,” “Proof from Tradition,” and “Proof from Reasoning,” that ultimately gave rise to the manual form of 19^th and 20^th century theology. A truly scientific theology avoids this form—as is clear if one considers, by way of contrast, Garrigou-Lagrange’s De revelatione, which is the closest of his writings to the “manual” genre mentioned here, yet deeply different in its style of exposition. Although it would be unfair to claim that concern for positive theology gave rise to the manuals derided by many who claim that this was the fault of scholasticism or “neo-scholasticism,” it is not without truth that a certain kind of positive theology did contribute to the “cataloging style” of so many manuals no less (perhaps more) than so-called “neo-Scholasticism.”↩︎

9. I am thinking of a point that Fr. Cajetan Cuddy has made in numerous places.↩︎

10. Regarding the true nature of probability, see the essays by Gardeil translated for To Be a Thomist.↩︎

11. For Thomists: Gardeil, Berthier, and Doronzo.↩︎

12. Thus, even if the multi-volume ecclesiological synthesis of Journet is stamped somewhat by his own interests and character, it has the scientific benefit of being something more than a kind of intellectual history. Moreover, the staying power of De Lubac—even where I theoretically disagree with him—lies in the fact that in most of his works he was in fact less animated by pure historical methodology but, rather, by making an argument. And this is also why for a generation Rahner and Lonergan ruled the roost in much of theology. The mind desires to meet another mind who makes an argument—even a problematic argument—and not merely a cataloguer of positions. This is why “pure academic-historical ressourcement” is never successful and why ressourcement’s greatest and truly successful exponents were never merely going back to the sources. In point of fact, they were attempting to make definitive and demonstrative (or at least potentially demonstrative) claims. They might have—a fault also shared by Thomist intellectual culture—gussied up their position by citing a lot of texts from Thomas, Patrologia Latina, and Patrologia Graeca, as though they were only echoing the past and exegeting texts. But the insistence with which, for example, the partisans of Cardinal de Lubac on questions of nature and grace contend their position against the Thomists bears witness to the fact that they seek demonstration, not a merely “probable” certainty. And this is why the greatest elements of ressourcement are infinitely more profound than the intellectual stamp collecting that the contemporary academy encourages, making Catholics fearful of making strong (but humble) claims, hiding instead behind textual and historical studies that are respectable and able to please tenure committees.↩︎

13. And the sense of “probable” will be that of the probabilists of yore: as though “probability” could be attached to a whole host of line-items on the tally sheet of probable positions. Here, as elsewhere, I am deeply indebted to the clear exposition of the nature of probable certainty offered by Gardeil and presented here on To Be a Thomist.↩︎

14. I am developing, in the line of Garrigou-Lagrange, Journet, et al., claims that are found in outline in an earlier article on To Be a Thomist by Fr. Cuddy.↩︎

15. Thus, what one used to refer to as “paradigm shifts” in the sciences would be the reorganization of a discipline that was perhaps not oriented around its deepest subject and principles, in whose light the architecture of the science’s objective illation must be reorganized, without, for all that, losing past acquisitions, even if those acquisitions must now be recognized as being situated within a much larger and more universal structure of scientific principles.↩︎

16. One might also add “poetic” reasoning, as a kind of presentation of likenesses. For the purposes of this brief article, I am wrapping that somewhat into the logic of rhetoric.↩︎