Guido Mattiussi and Joseph Maréchal – Two Jesuits in Contrast Over Kant at the Origins of Modernism – Part Three (3/3)
Can Kant's Doctrine of Knowledge Be Reconciled with That of St. Thomas?
In the years following the publication of the encyclical, two learned Jesuits appeared within the Society of Jesus: first, Father Guido Mattiussi, and later, Father Joseph Maréchal. They noticed that the encyclical Pascendi was essentially a warning against the errors of Kant, which, under the guise of modernizing theology, had infiltrated Catholic thought. They each took opposing positions: Mattiussi justified the Kantian errors condemned by the encyclical, highlighting Kant's agnosticism due to his phenomenalism and the principle of his immanentism, which he then contrasted with St. Thomas [1], while Maréchal, supported by thorough Kantian studies and a solid Thomistic background, developed an audacious thesis, prepared by the publication of five books rich in historical and critical scholarship. According to this thesis, while maintaining papal condemnations, it was still possible to find a point of convergence between the philosophy of St. Thomas and Kant, since, according to Maréchal, Kant's transcendental method could be "transposed" into terms of Thomistic epistemological realism[2].
Maréchal does not deny Kant's agnosticism, but he believes that it can be overcome with an adequate interpretation and lead to realism, "starting from Kant's principles"[3], thus aligning with the thought of St. Thomas. However, I must frankly say that these programmatic propositions leave one at least somewhat perplexed because when comparing them, it is unclear whether the point of contact between Thomas and Kant lies in the fact that they are saying the same thing in two different languages, or whether they both meet in realism—Thomas in a coherent form, Kant by providing principles that could potentially overcome his idealism and remedy his agnosticism.
That there remains a trace of realism in Kant is certainly true, and this is given by his doctrine of the thing-in-itself, which remains truly existent, external to the mind, and independent of the mind, a source of knowledge since the sensory experience we have provides us with the data of sense, allowing us to know the thing as a phenomenon.
However, the fact that the essence of the thing remains unknown to us, while the object of knowledge—the phenomenon—is constructed by the subject using a priori forms, represents an idealistic principle that contradicts the realism of the external thing-in-itself.
This is why Fichte, intent on developing the idealistic principle, recognizing the idealistic potential of Kant's notion of the 'I think,' chose to enhance it by eliminating the troublesome thing-in-itself, which hindered the progress of idealism. He shifted the thing-in-itself from outside the self to its interior, making it a 'non-self' placed by the self within the self—offering a tone of pity and derision toward the poor realists, who believe that reality exists outside the self, when, in fact, it is placed by the self within the self
Now, Maréchal seems to find a principle of realism—and therefore a connection to St. Thomas—not so much in the thing-in-itself, which remains an undoubted element of realism in Kant, but rather in what he calls the "finalism or dynamism of the intellect," according to which the intellect in every judgment would possess an immediate impulse or tension toward the absolute. This idea, however, is not found in either Kant or Thomas, both of whom, as they should, associate knowledge and the activity of the intellect with thought, formal cause, and representation, rather than with motion, action, or final cause, which pertain to the will
Undoubtedly, the intellect has an end, which is to know the truth. But it is the will that directs the intellect to achieve its end, which is its good; and the intellect moves the will towards the attainment of the end. However, the intellect does not have, on its own, a force or an impulse that moves it toward its end, like an active subject approaching a goal. All this dynamism belongs to the will.
The intellect achieves its end simply in an act that is the act of an act, not of a power. The act of the intellect is the identification of thinking with the thought, an instantaneous and timeless act. It is the intellectual power that moves from potency to act, but not the act of knowing. The act of knowing is instantaneous and supratemporal, unlike the act of the will, which, in moving a body, unfolds in time.
It is true that Kant conceives knowing more as a doing or forming than as an intentional being or representing, and assigns to practical reason the decision to affirm ("postulate") the existence of God. But in dealing with knowledge, Kant never speaks of the finalism of the intellect[4]. Even less does St. Thomas speak of it, who, as is well known, carefully distinguishes the activity of the intellect from that of the will, placing the tension towards the end in the will and not in the intellect. In the activity of the intellect, there is no inclination or tendency, only act, that is, the identification of the act of thinking with the act of the thought, of representing with the represented.
But in epistemology, idealism and realism oppose each other without the possibility of reconciliation, unless we exclude the intentional identity of the intellect and the thing in the act of knowing, as noted by both idealist and Thomistic philosophers. To want to be at the same time realist and idealist, Thomist and Kantian, is to serve two masters, which is disgraceful for any philosopher or theologian worthy of the name. This is what the great Pope Pius X teaches us with his immortal encyclical.
Shadows and Lights of Kantian Philosophy
Mattiussi, by making explicit the accusation of agnosticism raised by the encyclical, highlights the fact that Kant, when he wants to eliminate doubt, agnosticism, and skepticism, ends up falling into them. He destroys what he needs to build, rejecting the very criterion and standard required for judgment and comparison. This is what Mattiussi points out.
Indeed, if we deny the possibility of our intellect adjusting to things as they are, how should we suppose we are making a true assertion, that is, one that corresponds to things as they are? If we deny that we can know things as they are, by what criterion do we deny this possibility, if not because we are convinced that we are reflecting things as they are with our thesis? If we deny that we can grasp reality, how can we do so if not because we are convinced that, by doing so, we are telling the truth, that is, grasping reality?
Kant, however, admits the unconditional, the objectivity, the universality, the necessity, and the certainty of knowledge. He admits the intelligible and the thinkable, which he calls the noumenon. He is neither a materialist nor a skeptic.
It could also be said that Kant’s thing-in-itself is not reality ut sic, but rather material reality, since the thing he refers to offers the senses the material of knowledge. On the other hand, the validity of the science of phenomena cannot be denied, through which we can know the external appearance or the sensible properties of a thing, even though its essence escapes us. Conversely, when dealing with the human spirit, Kant moves with confidence and full certainty, implying that here he perfectly knows the essence of the reality of the res.
However, by rejecting the possibility of speculative reason rising to God from the phenomena and the knowledge of things in themselves, Kant closes the human spirit in on itself, and from this arises the immanentist tendency: if God exists, He exists only within our mind. That He exists in reality is a possibility, but it is not proven.
For Kant, God exists as the supreme idea of speculative reason and as a need of practical reason. In this sense, He can be considered the ens summum and realissimum. Kant sees the mistake of Aristotle and Christianity as personifying and hypostasizing a simple idea, treating it as if it were a person before me, above me, with whom I can converse and from whom I can receive revelations and favors. This, therefore, is fanaticism and superstition.
As a consequence, a distortion of metaphysics follows. Kant respects metaphysics, but, like Descartes, he considers Aristotle’s metaphysics insufficiently grounded and claims to provide a certain scientific foundation for metaphysics, following Descartes. Thus, as in Descartes, the object of metaphysics is no longer the ens, but Cartesian self-consciousness.
The object of metaphysics is no longer the reality, but self-knowledge and that which is found a priori in consciousness, or as Heidegger will say, it is the man who questions being, the man who is, therefore, the Dasein (being-there) of being. Thus, metaphysics merges with anthropology. But the absolute being is God; hence, man becomes God. And we have modern atheism and pantheism.
The transcendental in Kant, as is well known, is no longer the ens, and transcendental philosophy is no longer that which has for its object the ens, but, as Kant says, transcendental philosophy becomes “every knowledge that deals not with objects, but with our way of knowing the objects since this must be possible a priori”[5].
Now, for Kant, what he calls the “way” of knowing is not a true way, but is already contained and the object of knowledge, for it is self-consciousness, the ego cogito, the activity of the intellect in possession of its a priori forms, the “pure concepts” or categories, which shape the material coming from experience in experimental knowledge or are the ideas of reason in the speculative domain or the moral law in the field of human conduct.
Thus, this Kantian “way” of knowing is, in reality, already knowing; it is an immediate and indeterminate preconception of the absolute, as a circumscribing, transcendental, a priori, and formal horizon, before categorical experimental knowledge, a posteriori, drawn from the experience of things.
The Kantian transcendental is the consequence of his “Copernican revolution,” according to which the subject no longer turns to the object, but towards itself. In epistemological terms: the intellect no longer turns to the res, the thing outside the soul, but to itself and its data of consciousness, no longer to reality, but to the idea of reality. In religious terms: man no longer turns towards God, but towards himself. The idealist says to God: “Not Your will, but my will be done.”
It is not a true transcendental, because it is only the human spirit, which is merely a category, that, by itself, divides being alongside the material. Yet with Kant, it claims to appropriate all of being for itself. But since matter is also being, idealism, which cannot ignore matter but does not wish to limit being to spirit, ultimately ends up materializing the spirit and falling into materialism. A striking example of this dialectic is the transition from Hegel to Marx.
Thus, it is evident that for Kant, knowing is not a representation of the form of the thing, but rather an active process, it is a giving form to a matter, even if that matter is offered by the thing. The known thing does not have a form of its own independently of the intellect; it is a form that is made the intellect's own, which does not receive the form, is not informed by it, but gives it or already possesses it before knowing the thing itself.
Instead, let us say that the true mode of knowing, which Kant does not know or rejects, is the abstracting operation, by which the intellect abstracts the universal essence from the particular sensible. He admits the abstract but without realizing that it is abstracted from the senses, and believes that it is already abstracted on its own, as Plato had already thought.
"Kant’s declared aim, much like Descartes', is to establish a foundation and certainty for knowledge. However, the result is disappointing. The phenomenon is indeed the appearance, the unveiling, or the manifestation of the thing. But if it remains tied to an essence that is unknown to us, what is the point of a 'manifestation of the thing' that doesn't reveal its essence?"
If we cannot know the quidditas rei materialis, what criterion do we have to overcome skepticism? Do we perhaps have an intuition or immediate vision of the spirit? How does Kant make his observations on spirit, reason, intellect, consciousness, thought, knowledge, and judgments, if he has not arrived at them from knowledge of the external sensible things as they are in themselves?
Does this mean he believes it possible to conceive the phenomenon as an appearance of the spiritual? And when Kant speaks of experience, are we sure that he refers only to sensible experience and does not also admit a spiritual experience? Where does he get the certainty of the universal and necessary laws of practical and speculative reason? Of pure concepts and the ideas of reason? Of the certainty of a priori science and the absoluteness of duty?
For Kant, representation represents nothing but itself, as a modification of the subject. The thing remains outside the intellect, unknown in itself. We know that it exists, we know that the material of experience comes from it, but the object of our experimental knowledge is nothing but the phenomenon, which, however, is the thing as it appears to us, shows itself, reveals itself. It is not a simple appearance that can deceive; it is truth, but a truth that leaves us ignorant of the essence of the thing in itself.
Kant proves to be unprepared, however, regarding the philosophy of nature or philosophical cosmology. This is very harmful because it also embraces philosophical anthropology, where it is possible to know the essence of the thing in itself, and this is the same human nature. In this, Kant reflects the Cartesian dualism of res cogitans, reason, and res extensa, the body, and lacks the perception of the human soul as the substantial form of the body.
However, it must be noted that Kant explicitly and insistently admits the existence of spirit. This is something the Pascendi does not address. The “thing” in Kant is the material thing, the physical nature. Thus, Kant admits both the material and the spiritual. However, he calls "real" only the material. Spirit, for him, seems to belong only to the realm of the ideal.
Here Kant is mistaken: the distinction between the real (ens reale) and the ideal (ens rationis) does not correspond to that between the material and the spiritual, but rather to that between thought and being. It should also be noted that the real is not only the material but also the spiritual. And the ideal is indeed spiritual, but it is an act of the spirit, which is a substantial being. The thing (res), on the other hand, is not only the material thing but also the spiritual one. The thing is the being from the perspective of the essence, it is reality.
When addressing the question of whether we can know the essence of the material thing, we must distinguish: of some things, we can grasp their essence; of others, we know that they have an essence, but we do not know it except in the phenomenon or as a phenomenon. Kant recognizes the science of phenomena, but he has failed to recognize natural philosophy, that is, the philosophical science of nature or the essence of both living and non-living material substance, and thus the science of both material form and spiritual form, which is the soul.
For this reason, he was unable to accept the Aristotelian distinction between the degrees of the natural being: the material form, the vegetative soul, the sensitive soul, and the rational soul. He considers reason, but does so in the manner of Descartes, as if it were a subsistent substance, whereas reason is a power of the soul.
If we remain in the realm of the experimental sciences, the recording and codification of observable, measurable, constant, and regularly verifiable values may suffice, and here Kant is certainly correct. This is the science of phenomena, such as chemistry, physics, astronomy, biology, zoology, botany, experimental psychology, philology, sociology, and ethnology.
But if we are to know what the essence of a being (ti to on?) is, or the scale of natural beings, or what man is, or what life or spirit or cosmic nature is, or what the value of morality or religion or theology is, then our intellect has the possibility of knowing scientifically the essence of these things as they are in themselves. Moreover, Kant himself implicitly admits this by making reason and knowledge the object of his philosophical inquiry.
On the other hand, we cannot deny a certain value in Kant's ethics, for which the moral law dictated by practical reason is universally and obligatory for all and immutable, executable by free will, the execution or transgression of which is respectively attributable to merit or demerit.
If Maréchal therefore wanted to find points of contact between Kant and Thomas, beyond the doctrine of the external thing to the subject, he could have cited the epistemological status of the science of physical phenomena (the physical-mathematical science) and the characteristics of intelligibility, universality, necessity, obligation, and immutability inherent in the moral law ordered by practical reason.
P. Giovanni Cavalcoli OP
Fontanellato, December 26, 2024
Source:
https://padrecavalcoli.blogspot.com/p/guido-mattiussi-e-joseph-marechal-due_32.html
Notes:
[1] In his book Il veleno kantiano (The Kantian Poison), Rome, 1914.
[2] Le point de départ de la métaphysique (The Starting Point of Metaphysics), Paris-Louvain 1927, p. 30.
[3] P. 2.
[4] Even when Kant speaks of aesthetic judgment, he says that the intellect considers nature as an end, but he does not say that the intellect tends toward an end.
[5] Critica della ragion pura (Critique of Pure Reason), Laterza Editions, Bari 1965, p. 58.
[6] On the philosophy of nature, see Maritain: La filosofia della natura (The Philosophy of Nature), Morcelliana, Brescia 1974.