Scholasticism and Politics. Jacques Maritain

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СКАЧАТЬ go: I do not understand the question, it has no meaning for me, and shuts its mouth. It is for faith that such questions have meaning; it is faith which must answer. By an unexpected reversion, the object which Aristotle assigned to metaphysics passes to faith. Science does not know being, but faith—at least for him, who has received this gift—does. Let us crown neo-positivism by neo-fideism, and all will go well, with, moreover, a remarkable economy of intellectual effort.

      However, solutions and conciliations acquired at the expense of intelligence, are never sound. In regard to faith let us question the believers, for they are evidently competent witnesses. What do they say? They say that, for them, faith is an obscure adherence to primordial Truth, which means a certain knowledge, not a science, not a demonstrative knowledge (Wissen), but a kind of knowing (Erkennen); for if it is not a kind of knowing, it is nothing. Now, if all assertions of an ontological type are devoid of meaning, not only for empiriological science, but purely and simply, then how can the assertions of faith preserve their meaning? Thus faith runs the risk of being considered, according to the rationalist scheme already outlined by Spinoza, as a simple affective and practical disposition, without content of truth or value of knowledge. On the other hand, faith involves rational implications; it implies, for instance, the possibility for reason to prove the existence of God starting from creatures. And this will also perish in the neo-positivist conception of knowledge and of the life of reason.

      Nevertheless, the Viennese school in general (I do not speak of this or that popularizer) recognizes that, outside the field proper to science, faith has a domain against which science as such has absolutely no interdict to formulate; to link science to a general atheistic conception, or to speak of a ‘scientific atheism’, is from its point of view pure nonsense. In this it is drastically opposed to other tendencies, which I mentioned at the beginning, and especially to the philosophy of science proposed by dialectic materialism.

      This opposition appears to me particularly suggestive, because the Viennese theory arises from the reflections, more or less well conducted, of logicians and scientists concerning the peculiar conditions of modern science. This theory is, if I may thus express myself, of endogenous origin. On the contrary, the Marxist theory of science is of exogenous origin; it is derived from a general conception of man and of the world, in which the historic-social aspect is dominant, and it is this Weltanschauung which imposes on the partisans of dialectic materialism a certain interpretation of science. Let us remember the original relations between Marxism and left-wing Hegelianism, and we shall not be surprised if the door, which neo-positivism leaves open to religious horizons, should be, in Marxist epistemology, brutally shut.

      V

      DIALECTIC MATERIALISM

      Here is not the place to examine this epistemology in detail; I should like, however, to explain briefly how, in my opinion, it should be envisaged.

      There are in Marxist epistemology a certain number of traits, which do not displease a Thomist: its aversion for idealism, its affirmation of the reality of the external world, the role it grants to the body in knowledge itself (in the first degrees of human knowledge), the importance (unfortunately principal) which it bestows upon material causality, the sense which it possesses of historical becoming (and which, reduced to just proportions, would be a highly philosophic sense, but which in the Marxist theory devours everything). Marxist dogmatism itself, even if it appears to us a counterfeit of real, organic, doctrinal force, has at least the courage of systematic unity. And even Marxist atheism, however absurd we may think it, supposes at least, that human reason must answer the question whether God is or is not, without seeking refuge in the parentheses of a science of phenomena, from which it refuses to emerge.

      Having said as much, I will indicate two highly typical traits of Marxist epistemology: that which one might call its practicalism, and that which one might call its dialecticism. In both of these respects, the Marxist theory of science is, in my opinion, a destruction of science.

      To sum up, Marxism not only ordains knowledge to action (which, according to Aristotle, is proper only in a certain category of knowledge); it makes knowledge itself consist in an activity exercised on things, in an activity of work and domination of matter, and of transformation of the world: if Aristotle is right in considering activity ad extra, ‘transitive’ activity, as the mode proper to activity, not of the mind, but precisely of bodies, of physical agents,—it appears that this demiurgic conception of knowledge is something like an idea of titans, still indistinct from nature and enslaved by it, and moving in the depths of the earth their members made of roots and rocks.

      It is true that the practical aspect has predominated in science since Bacon and Descartes, and has imposed itself with particular force in modern times, by reason of the close relations existing between our science and industry. But this practical aspect will never succeed in excluding the irreducible speculative value of science,—in other words, the relation of truth, with its proper criteria. Let us admit that what in the modern world interests the scientist, and gives him the courage to work at tasks which dispense but meagre intellectual delights, is the growing desire to act on the world and to transform matter; such is the aim of him who works (finis operantis). But the aim of the work itself or of science itself (finis operis), that which interests science as such,—the end which it aims at in so far as it is a mathematical interpretation of phenomena,—is now and always to know. To banish this speculative finality from empiriological sciences, to deprive them of their speculative nature, is to become immediately extraneous to the question. It is a sort of barbarity which, if it had the efficacious power, would dry up at its very roots the activity of knowing.

      The second character of Marxist epistemology is its dialecticism. It pretends to find in the sciences themselves the typical process of dialectics, understood in the sense which Marx gives to this word: the self-movement of the concrete by negation of the present position, negation of the negation, etc.; and as this pretension cannot be achieved by merely considering the relation of science with its object, it is to the movement of science itself in time, to the history of science, that it must have recourse. That human science, by virtue of its structure, demands to evolve in time, to have a history; that it should consequently imply a certain dialectical movement, due to the interaction of the internal logic of ideas with the needs and dispositions of the thinking subject—this indeed is a great truth. But what I should like to note here is the typical procedure of dialectical materialism: this consists, not merely in recognizing the importance of history, but in using the history of a thing, first, in order to juggle away the nature of the thing, and then to explain the thing by replacing it by its history. The history of poetry presupposes poetry. Are you going to study poetry and to ask yourself in what poetry consists (which by the way will not hinder, and will even encourage reference to its history)? No: you will say how poetry has developed in history; thanks to a series of successive internal contradictions, oppositions and syntheses, one state of poetry engendering another state by auto-negation,—romanticism springing forth from classicism, and proletarian poetry emerging from bourgeois poetry, which, by denying itself, surpasses itself, etc. And behold!—this is all. There is nothing more to say about poetry. Dialectical materialism is satisfied with this account of it. All this supposes, of course, empirical notions concerning poetry, collected more or less extensively, but no philosophical analysis whatever regarding the nature of poetry. The scientific form, which is the definitive condition of knowledge, is sought for in history.

      Even if the history in question is exactly reported, the matters in question well observed and well described, all that is true in this pseudo-explanation will have served only to prevent and to annihilate the very problems of philosophy and of science concerning the nature of poetry and its constitutive truth. Moreover, the history in question will not be apt to be exactly reported, because it will not be content with being a history, but will make all the explicative pretensions, which it has stolen from science and philosophy, СКАЧАТЬ