Mind, matter, and malleability

Continuing our look at Jacques Maritain’s Three Reformers: Luther, Descartes, Rousseau, let’s consider some arresting passages on the conception of human nature the modern world has inherited from Descartes.  Maritain subtitles his chapter on the subject “The Incarnation of the Angel.”  As you might expect, this has in part to do with the Cartesian dualist’s view that the mind is a res cogitans or thinking substance whose nature is wholly incorporeal, so that it is only contingently related to the body.  But it is the Cartesian doctrine of innate ideas and its implications that Maritain is most interested in. 

For a Scholastic Aristotelian like Aquinas, though the human intellect is immaterial, it is unfurnished until sensory experience gives it contact with mind-independent physical reality.  Even when it rises to the highest of the metaphysical heights and comes to know something of the immaterial and divine First Cause of all things, it does so only on the basis of inference from what it knows about matter.  An angelic intellect, by contrast, is completely separate from matter and thus from sensory organs.  Its knowledge is built into it at its creation.  And since it is God who then furnishes it, there is, naturally, no chance of error so long as the angel wills to attend to what it knows.

Descartes’ account of human knowledge essentially assimilates it to this angelic model.  For him, knowledge of the basic structure of reality is innate, rather than deriving from sensory experience.  This includes knowledge even of the nature of material things.  We need only confine our judgements to accepting those propositions and inferences that strike us as “clearly and distinctly” true and valid, respectively, for God would not allow us to be misled about those.  Error creeps in only when the will overreaches that limit and embraces some claim or inference that is not clear and distinct.  A purely mathematical conception of matter is a natural concomitant of this account of knowledge, for it alone has the requisite clarity and distinctness.

The problem, of course, is that we are not in fact angels; a faculty of infallible judgment is not built into us; and we cannot read off the natures of mind-independent things from our ideas of them.  Hence, when we interpret human knowledge in light of Descartes’ erroneous model, we are bound seriously to misunderstand it.  On the one hand, we might fall into a dogmatism that mistakenly takes a certain successful – but nevertheless limited and fallible – way of conceiving of the world as if it were an exhaustive and necessary way of doing so.  On the other hand, we might fall into a subjectivism that despairs of ever getting beyond our own ideas to objective reality.  Both tendencies result from taking our own representations of the world to be all we really know directly.  The first tendency, which takes these representations to be angel-like in their adequacy to reality, yields excessive optimism.  The second tendency, which comes to see that our representations are not angel-like, yields excessive pessimism.

Kant did not transcend these two opposite extreme errors of dogmatism and subjectivism, but rather combined them.  On the one hand, he takes what is essentially just a modern, post-Cartesian account of the nature of the mind’s cognition of reality and dogmatizes it – confining our knowledge of the natural world to what post-Newtonian science has to tell us about it, and ruling out altogether any genuine knowledge of what transcends the natural world (such as the existence of God and the immortality of the soul).  On the other hand, he takes even our knowledge of the natural world to be knowledge only of how it appears to us, and not of things as they are in themselves.

The upshot, says Maritain, is that:

With [Descartes’] theory of representational ideas the claims of Cartesian reason to independence of external objects reach their highest point: thought breaks with Being.  It forms a sealed world which is no longer in contact with anything but itself; its ideas, now opaque effigies interposed between it and external objects, are still for Descartes a sort of lining of the real world… Here again Kant finishes Descartes’ work.  If the intelligence when it thinks, reaches immediately only its own thought, or its representations, the thing hidden behind these representations remains for ever unknowable. (p. 78)

Ironically, though, the sequel is not greater humility but rather a prideful self-deification.  If it cannot make sense of a reality independent of itself, the modern mind all too often decides to make itself the measure of reality:

The result of a usurpation of the angelic privileges, that denaturing of human reason driven beyond the limits of its species, that lust for pure spirituality, could only go to the infinite: passing beyond the world of created spirits it had to lead us to claim for our intelligence the perfect autonomy and the perfect immanence, the absolute independence, the aseity of the uncreated intelligence… [I]t remains the secret principle of the break-up of our culture and of the disease of which the apostate West seems determined to die…

[B]ecause it wants an absolute and undetermined liberty for itself, it is natural that human thought, since Descartes, refuses to be measured objectively or to submit to intelligible necessities.  Freedom with respect to the objective is the mother and nurse of all modern freedoms… we are no longer measured by anything, subject to anything whatever!  Intellectual liberty which Chesterton compared to that of the turnip (and that is a libel on the turnip), and which strictly only belongs to primal matter. (pp. 79-80)

Hence the varieties of idealism and relativism (perspectivalism, historicism, social constructivism, postmodernism, etc.) that have plagued Western thought and culture in the centuries after Kant. 

That’s an old story, of course, and a more complicated one than these remarks from Maritain let on.  But it’s not what I want to consider here.  Rather, what catches my eye is the comparison of the modern mind (as it tends to conceive of itself) to “primal matter.”  What does Maritain mean by this? 

Prime matter, in Aristotelian-Scholastic philosophy, is the pure potentiality to take on form.  Prime matter by itself is not any particular thing at all.  It becomes a concrete particular thing of some kind – water, gold, lead, a star, a tree, a dog, a human body, or whatever – only when conjoined with some substantial form or other.  And qua pure potentiality for form, it can become any of these things.  It is not limited to being a physical thing only of a certain kind (as is secondary matter, matter already having some substantial form or other).  (For discussion and defense of the notion of prime matter, see pp. 171-75 of Scholastic Metaphysics and pp. 310-24 of Aristotle’s Revenge.)

Maritain’s analogy is clear enough, then.  Just as prime matter can become anything (or at least anything physical, to be more precise) so too do constructivist and relativist theories make of human nature something indefinitely malleable.  But this might at first glance seem an odd criticism for an Aristotelian-Thomistic philosopher like Maritain to level against such views.  For Aristotle holds that knowledge involves the intellect’s taking on the form of the thing known.  And there is no limit in principle to what forms the intellect might in this way take on.  Indeed, Aristotle famously remarks in De Anima that, given this power of the intellect to take on the forms of all things, “the soul is in a way all the things that exist” (Book III, Chapter 8).  But if Aristotelians themselves allow that the intellect can in this sense become anything, why is there a problem with the views Maritain is criticizing saying something similar?  And why compare these views’ conception of human nature to prime matter, rather than to Aristotle’s own conception of the intellect?

The answer is to be found by answering another question, namely: What is the difference between the way prime matter takes on a certain form, and the way the intellect takes it on?  The difference is this: When prime matter takes on the form of a dog, the result is a dog.  But when the intellect takes on the form of a dog, the result is not a dog.  Rather, it is knowledge of a dog.  When Aristotle says that the soul – or to be more precise, one specific faculty of the soul, the intellect – is all things, he is, of course, speaking figuratively.  The intellect does not really become a dog when it grasps the form of a dog.  To be sure, the figure of speech is apt, because, by taking on the form of a dog, the intellect takes on the nature of a dog.  The intellect takes on “dogginess.”  But to take it on merely intellectually is precisely to take it on without actually being a dog.  By contrast, for matter to take on that nature just is to take it on in the sort of way that does entail being a dog. 

This should make it clear why Maritain’s analogy is appropriate.  Views that take reality to be relative to our perceptions, our language, our conventions, etc. make human beings out to be something like prime matter insofar as they entail that what a human being is (and not just what a human being knows) is indefinitely malleable, susceptible of changing with changes in perception, language, conventions, etc.  And, in fact, that is simply not true of us.  We are, among other things, by nature rational animals, and no change in our perceptions, language, conventions, or the like can change that in the least.  The most such changes can do is blind us to reality, but without changing reality itself.