Not everything Professor Cocks writes about over at the Orthosphere is correct. With this one, however, he hits it out of the park. Enjoy!
Political Correctness and the Death of Education
A Personal Reflection on Metaphysical Realism
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
– T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding
On a personal note, I have to say that epistemology was the single area of study that made me want to completely walk away from the field as an undergraduate philosophy student. I began to think that all philosophy was an attempt to explain how one knows what they know in a purely cognitive or psychological manner. When one starts with a theory of reality, and not reality itself, it is very easy to become internally circular in one’s thinking. One never gets to external objective reality. Without ever examining the nature or being of reality as it is in act, all one is left with is a subjective and somewhat skeptical view of the world. Metaphysics—the study of ultimate reality—becomes an impossibility. One never gets out of Plato’s cave.
I came to understand, however, how such circular thinking is possible and why epistemology seems to be the central focus for much of modern philosophy. There are many reasons why modern philosophy begins with theorizing about reality rather than accepting reality as it is, but I think I can briefly point to the influence of Rene Descartes, Idealism, and twentieth-century Existentialism.
Ever since Descartes, philosophy and the development of intellectual thought in the West has emphasized the primacy of the thinking individual apart from the world or concrete reality. External reality, of course, can be doubted or considered uncertain. For Descartes, the only certain thing that can be known is the fact that one is thinking. This is the famous doctrine of his “cogito,” I think therefore I am.” Modern philosophy, beginning with Descartes, finds its point of departure, not in the fact of being (reality)—as Aristotle did—but with doubt and skepticism. The movement of the mind, for Descartes, was to go from the autonomous thinking individual and one’s ideas to the real and external world. Of course, this makes epistemology, one’s theory of reality, the starting point of philosophy—not reality itself. Rather than making being the concrete touchstone of reality, Descartes places the independent thinking individual as the center point of existence. Descartes’ emphasis of doubt, uncertainty, and the autonomous thinking individual eventually gave birth to the “hermeneutics of suspicion” so popular among critical theorists today.
Of course, Descartes was not alone in this error. Plato and Plotinus laid the groundwork for the rationalism of Descartes, and later Spinoza. Such disembodied rationalism made the Idealism of Berkeley, Kant, and Hegel possible1. No wonder we now live in an age where the human spirit creates reality, no matter how chaotic, disordered, or disengaged from concrete being one’s conception of it might be.
Post World War Two Existentialism did not help things either. Just one example, among many, can be found in the writings of Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre, who never recovered from his inherent Cartesianism, had a powerful impact on Western philosophy, and laid the groundwork for much of postmodernism. Sartre’s famous line, “existence precedes essence” was meant to overturn classical Western thought. It nearly succeeded. In his understanding, the goal of philosophy is to reject abstraction in all its forms and focus on the freedom, autonomy, and self-determination of the individual, liberated from all universal or external values. The existentialism of Sartre is certain in its conviction that the human being is absolutely free to create his own values and embraces a firm denial that values or ethical absolutes are to be imposed externally or from outside the existing human individual. The will is all-determining and defining in Sartrean Existentialism. When it comes to human moral behavior we are left with a hardened societal clash of wills2.
Of course, it is true that existence and essence are different things3, the existentialist error, however, completely separates them. When it comes to the human person, the essence, or rational soul, is completely bound to the existence of the individual. In Christian Aristotelian terms, everything in the natural world is bound together by form and matter. Among contingent things, there is no form without matter and no matter without form. This is true for human existence as well. A body without essence or soul is just a body, not a person. To exist means to be in act through the composition of form and essence. From this perspective, Sartre completely misses the point of human existence and what it means to be human.
At some point, I will write about the philosophy of the person and how to genuinely preserve the significance of the individual in today’s cultural climate. For now, what keeps me sane, is the re-discovery of classical metaphysics, the inquiry and study of being as being, the acceptance of being as a gift that is complete in its “giveness.” Being itself is what keeps one grounded because it can not be denied. It is the first point of contact anyone has and is of special interest to the metaphysician. Being is prior to philosophical reflection. St. Thomas Aquinas puts it this way:
Now the first thing conceived by the intellect is being, because everything is knowable only in so far as it is in act as it says in [Aristotle’s] Metaphysics. Hence, being is the proper object of the intellect, and is that which is primarily intelligible, as sound is that which is primarily audible. (1, q. 5, art., 2)
Being grounds the individual because it the first thing one experiences in reality. Being is the giveness of order. One should walk away from circular philosophies that start with a predetermined theory of reality. But one should never reject the fullness and significance of being. I came to understand what T.S. Eliot was trying to explain in Little Gidding—actually, what he was emphasizing in all of his Four Quartets—that reality is the determinate of order. All reality has an order to it. Including the order of knowing, or how we understand the world around us. When the order of metaphysical reality is properly understood, we come back to the extra-mental order of place and time and receive it with renewed meaning, purpose, and significance.
Works Cited
Aquinas, Thomas. The Summa Theologica Volume 1. The Great Books of the Western World, edited by Mortimer J. Adler et al., Vol. 17, Encyclopedia Britannica, 1996.
Notes
1Prior to Berkeley, Kant, and Hegel, no philosopher was an Idealist, meaning no philosopher believed that the mind was ultimate in determining reality.
2Sartre would most likely disagree with this sentence. He would suggest that most people would work together for the common good, though, ironically, without a shared objective standard of good. Interestingly, he admits to the clash of wills in his essay entitled The Humanism of Existentialism.
3To learn more about this, read St. Thomas Aquinas’ wonderful text, “On Being and Essence.”
Of Simple Apprehension and Concept
Now it is impossible for a thing’s being to be caused by its essential principles, for nothing can be the sufficient cause of its own being, if its being is caused—Thomas Aquinas
In previous posts, we spent some time thinking about how the intellect works and receives reality. The intellect is potency to knowledge and can only receive that which is in act (being) through sense experience. As St. Thomas reminds us, “intelligence is compared to sense, as act is to potency”.1 It is important in this discussion to understand the distinction of simple apprehension and concept because the blurring and conflating of these categories is one of the greatest errors among Idealists. We have seen that through induction and abstraction, the essence of the external object is married to the intellect. This union of essence, or universal, with the intellect is also known as, concept, idea, species or intention. For now, we will use the term concept.
There are many different kinds of concepts, of course, and it is the task of metaphysicians and logicians to catalog, classify, and put them in proper order. For classical realists, knowledge is always of being – of that which is in some order. In this way, epistemology would be better understood as the ontology of knowing—an examination of the first principles and the order of knowing reality.
In the order of knowing, the concept is not the being of the external object, it is the essence. (Being, or that which is in act, is always matter and form.) The concept resides in the intellect as the essence or universal abstracted from external reality through the senses. To confuse the concept, or idea, with being itself is the error of the idealist.
The realist philosopher Daniel Sullivan puts it this way:
It is important to recognize that while the concept is necessary to rational knowing, it is only a means by which we know, and not that which we know. It is a necessary means, just as eyeglasses may be necessary for me to see with; yet just as it is really the table I see and not the lenses of my eyeglasses, so too it is really the thing itself I know and not my concept of it. To say that the objects of my knowing are concepts rather than things would be to fall into the trap of those philosophers called Idealists. For if all we ever know is always idea, then we can never know whether or not there is anything existing outside our mind corresponding to our ideas. Thus, following the Idealist, all reality would consist of minds and the thoughts they think.2
If one does not properly make the distinction between concept and real actual being, skepticism, uncertainty, and doubt about reality results. The perennial questions of reality will always be reduced to subjectivism. One would have no certain contact with reality outside their mind.
Drawing from St. Thomas, Dr. Adler explains:
This distinction between the id quod (that which) and the id quo (that by which) of our intellectual acts prevents us from ever saying that our concepts are that which we are conscious or aware of when we understand ideas. We could not be aware of the concepts in our minds and also at the same time be aware of their intelligible objects. If we were, we could not distinguish between them, which would mean we could not affirm that such objects exist and are shared by other minds.3
Our concepts do not tell us that things are, they tell us what things are; they reveal nature or essence, not existence. “The existence of things is outside the order of concepts,” wrote St. Thomas.4 The point to remember is that the being of an idea or concept in the mind is a different mode of existence than that of the actual external object – each belongs to a different order. Physical reality and knowing are different orders. Cognitively, humans have the ability to distinguish between that which and that by which they are aware of something. This allows one to affirm or deny the reality of something through the intellectual faculty of judgment. When the mind engages in careful and critical reflection, the essence in the intellect always points back to concrete reality. (I explained a little how the faculty of judgment works in my posts on Berkeleyan Idealism. I hope to develop the idea further as we move along.)
The process by which the intellect grasps the essence or universal is what classical realists call simple apprehension: apprehension, because the mind receives and comes to understand the essential nature of the sense object; simple, because the mind naturally takes in the intentional concept without affirming or denying it through the faculty of judgment. The operation of simple apprehension is the first act of knowing.
Without these concepts firmly understood, it is easy to fall into the error of Idealism. However, the idealist must conclude that the essence, or concept, is the cause of reality (indeed, that is the very definition of Idealism) but this is impossible because no contingent being can be the cause of its own existence.
Works Cited
Adler, Mortimer. Adler’s Philosophical Dictionary: 125 Key Terms for the Philosopher’s Lexicon. New York: Scribner, 1995.
Aquinas, Thomas. The Summa Theologica Volume 1. The Great Books of the Western World, edited by Mortimer J. Adler et al., Vol. 17, Encyclopedia Britannica, 1996.
Sullivan, Daniel. An Introduction to Philosophy: Perennial Principles of the Classical Realist Tradition. Charlotte, North Carolina: TAN Books, 2009.
Wilhelmsen, Frederick D. Man’s Knowledge of Reality: An Introduction to Thomistic Epistemology. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1956.
Notes
1Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Trans. by Father Laurence Shapcote of the Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1996) 1a, q.3, art. 5.
2Daniel Sullivan, An Introduction to Philosophy: Perennial Principles of the Classical Realist Tradition (Charlotte, North Carolina: TAN Books, 2009), 79.
3 Mortimer J. Adler, Adler’s Philosophical Dictionary (New York: Scribner, 1995), S. V. Idea.
4Frederick D. Wilhemsen, Man’s Knowledge of Reality: An Introduction to Thomistic Epistemology (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1956) 29.
On Metaphysical Realism, Where We Have Been, Where we Are Going
Being is the actuality of every form or nature; for goodness or humanity are spoken of as actual only because they are spoken of as being. Therefore being must be compared to essence, if the latter is distinct from the former, as act to potency. — St. Thomas, Summa Theologica, I, q. 3, art. 4.
Before I go any farther, I would like to recall what we have learned in the last four posts, and explain some important concepts before we get to the distinction of apprehension and concept. A solid understanding of being will allow one to fully grasp the error of idealism.
First, we have learned the following:
1. Human beings grasp reality as it is. When the senses and the mind work together symbiotically, one correctly apprehends being.
2. Being is the first principle of reality, logic, and the order of understanding. The laws of logic are properties of being.
3. Our senses are the only connection we have to external reality, therefore our senses are the first principle of understanding.
All of the above implies that the evidence of being is lost, erased, or forgotten when philosophers wrongly separate the mind from the body. (We will get to how this develops from Descartes and various idealists, later.) One does not perceive reality by the mind alone or by the senses alone, but both working together. In the human person, form and matter can not be separated.
Definitions are always important. When I write about philosophical idealism this is what I mean:
In metaphysics, idealism is the theory that all reality consists of mind and its ideas. Idealism denies the material primacy of reality. Thus, idealism is also suspicious of knowledge built exclusively on the observation of matter. There are various kinds of idealists (which, again, we will get to later). However, most idealists fall into two schools – subjective and objective idealism. Subjective idealists such as George Berkeley (1685 – 1753) hold that ideas alone exist (although he used the term ‘idea’ in novel ways) and since all ideas only exist in the mind, all reality is mind dependent. Objective idealists such as Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804) do not deny the existence of reality, but hold that one can not know it. All idealists hold that the mind is ultimate in determining reality and are suspicious of the notion that reality (being) is the determinant of order in the world.
Because being is the touchstone of all reality, I define being as the following:
The term ‘being’ most simply refers to the fact that something exists. It can be further analyzed into abstract being (e.g., ideas, mathematical entities, etc. that exist mentally, this is sometimes called subjective existence) and concrete being (e.g., people and things that can be experienced with the senses, sometimes called real existence). Aristotle taught that the study of being as being is the primary concern for the metaphysician. In the realist tradition, the fact of being and theories about it are two distinctly separate ontological and epistemological questions.
Although we will probably not get into the grammar of being for a while, I think this quote from St. Thomas is helpful as we review where we have been (I hope it will provide a little more understanding to the previous posts). That which is in act participates in being. “Being” is taken from the verb ‘to be.’ In the grammatical expression of being, realists understand it to be both a participle and verb. Aquinas explains how being is a verb:
The verb is consignifies composition, because it does not signify this principally but secondarily. Is signifies primarily that which the intellect apprehends as being absolutely actual, for in the absolute sense is means to be in act, and thus its mode of signification is that of a verb. But, since the actuality which is principally signifies is universally the actuality of every form, whether substantial or accidental, when we wish to signify that any form or any act whatever actually exists in a subject, we express that fact by this verb is. (St. Thomas, Commentary on Aristotle’s “On Interpretation,” Book I, lect. 5, end).
Keep these ideas in mind as we discover how apprehension and concept work in the intellect. My hope here is to clarify concepts as they develop and to provide further explication.
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