Scholasticism and Politics. Jacques Maritain

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СКАЧАТЬ grasped, while they blunt their point, as Pascal says. By a positivist conceptualization, by a bad conceptualization the school of Vienna impairs,—a phenomenon often observed,—a good intuition, the reflexive intuition of which I have spoken, and by which modern science becomes conscious of itself.

      We must here remember, that the logicians of Vienna have conducted their analysis according to a certain philosophical spirit, which they have not bethought themselves to submit to a critical revision, and which derives at the same time from empiricism, from nominalism, and from conceptions advanced by logistics. They suffer, moreover, from many specifically modern prejudices and ignorances. On one hand, they know but one science, the science of phenomena, the science of the laboratory; and, as good disciples of Descartes, they form of this science, and of all sciences, an idea deplorably univocal. On the other hand, they know but one kind of philosophy and metaphysics, at once bookish, profoundly arbitrary and gigantically ambitious; a kind of philosophy against which they have good reason to protest. We must admit that Mr. Carnap holds a good hand against Mr. Heidegger. It is indeed easy, too easy, to indulge here in a humorous injustice, and to declare that a metaphysician is a musician who has missed his calling.

      We must therefore not be surprised by the excesses of the Viennese school in the systematization which it offers of the views—just in themselves, at least partially—which I have spoken of, concerning the logical structure of the sciences of phenomena. I have already suggested that, to my mind, they do not escape the danger of a delusive purism, to which every positivist conception of science is naturally exposed.

      Obsessed by that aspect of science, characteristic enough, but not exhaustive, which we have already discussed, the Viennese forget that if science reaches the being of things only obliquely and by means of merely ideal constructions, it is being in truth, which it nevertheless reaches, as Leibniz said, in an enigmatic and ‘blind’ fashion. The school of Vienna ignores what Meyerson has so acutely pointed out: the incurably realistic tendency of the science of phenomena. If it seems to give an account of the logical structure toward which science tends, as toward its ideal limit,—science as already completed, and more and more perfectly rationalized,—this school neglects certain profound characters of science in the making, that is, of the process of research and the work of scientific discovery. However scandalous for positivist orthodoxy, this work can be performed only with a feeling for the subjacent importance of the causes and essences of things, that is, in the climate, however obscure to the scientist himself, of the ontological mystery of the universe. That is why the problem of the adequation to the real remains central, though under an enigmatic form, for scientists like Mr. Gonseth who, with a few other mathematicians and physicists, delivered a considerable blow to the dictatorial pretensions of the Viennese school, during the philosophic congress in July, 1937, in Paris. On the other hand, as the late Professor Bumstead said, ‘any sort of logic (or the lack of logic) is permissible’ in the work of experimental discovery.

      And yet it is in another field that one finds the essential error,—linked to this first mistake,—for which this school is to be blamed. The essential error is, as I have already said, to confuse that which is true (with certain restrictions) of the science of phenomena, and that which is true of all science and of all knowledge in general, of all scientific knowing. It is to apply universally to all human knowledge that which is valid only in one of its particular spheres. This leads to an absolute negation of metaphysics, and the arrogant pretension to deny that metaphysical assertions have any meaning.

      I have earlier referred to what has no meaning for the physicist. If one simply suppresses these three little words—‘for the physicist’—one will declare: that which has no meaning for the physicist has no meaning at all. This is a uniformization, a brutal way of restricting human science, which is not preceded by a critical examination of the life of the mind, and which cannot be so (for one would then have to enter into metaphysics in order to deny its possibility); a uniformization which, finally, is based only on the positivist superstition concerning positive science. But metaphysics does not let itself be done away with so easily. Before deciding that the question, ‘Does a primary cause of being exist?’ has no meaning, we should first ask ourselves whether the question, ‘Does the philosophy of the school of Vienna exist?’ is not a question deprived of meaning.

      The objection has been justly raised against the Viennese position that if the meaning of a judgment consists in its method of (experimental) verification,—not only in the usage proper to experimental sciences, but in an absolute manner; if any judgment which cannot be thus verified is devoid of meaning, then this school’s own theory has no meaning, because it is incapable of being verified in this manner. It is incapable, even in principle, of space-time verifications. The theory of the Viennese is in fact a philosophical theory, a philosophy of science; and, in my opinion, the principle which I have just mentioned, the principle of the necessity of logico-experimental verification, is true in regard to the function of judgment in the empiriological sciences; but it is true only in this domain. A philosophy which generalizes this principle and extends it to the entire field of knowledge, seeing in it an exigency of the nature of all judgments truly valuable for knowledge,—such a philosophy thus destroys itself.

      The Viennese entirely ignore the mode of resolving the concepts which we have described as ontological, and which occurs in the direction of intelligible being. They do not see that, if it is true that all knowledge properly speaking supposes an intersubjectivation submitted to fixed rules of significance, such an intersubjectivation is not met with only on the plane of scientific knowledge, but also on the philosophical plane, where it acts, however, in quite a different way, and refers above all, not to an operation of the external senses, but to an intelligible perception. The Viennese do not see that the meaning of a judgment is derived from the intelligible objects which it composes or divides in the act of being. If, in empiriological sciences, meaning implies a possibility of physical verification, it is because, in this particular case, the objects of such notions are themselves conceived in relation to the operation of the senses. The chief point in criticizing neo-positivism is a warning to us of the irremediable mistake caused by a univocist conception of knowledge, and as a reminder, by antithesis, of the great words by which St. Thomas condemned Descartes before his day: ‘It is a sin against intelligence to want to proceed in an identical manner in the typically different domains—physical, mathematical and metaphysical—of speculative knowledge.’

      I have spoken too much perhaps of the ideas of the school of Vienna. The reason is that such ideas,—where an excessive simple-mindedness impairs much that is true,—characterize rather well the average state of mind which, succeeding materialism and the older positivism, will no doubt prevail among scientists and, especially, among popularizers of science, with which we shall have to deal for some time to come. It is important to take this state of mind into account, and to consider how problems concerning the degrees of knowledge can be presented to it.

      Let us start with the highest degrees of knowledge, those which deal with the supra-rational order. It is remarkable, in fact, that logical neo-positivism looks at these degrees of knowledge—of the supra-rational order—with less disfavour than at the degrees of an order entirely rational, namely, metaphysics and philosophy. Generally speaking, the school of Vienna manifests no hostility toward religion, and certain representatives of this school, perhaps in memory of Bolzano and Brentano, show a certain sympathy for the work of the theologians, whom they prefer to university philosophers.

      Let us now consider how some people appear to be so ready to “compromise” things in this way.

      Science (i.e. the science of phenomena) knows only the space-time connections of the observable; it does not know being. And, it is always added, there is no other science, there is no rational knowledge other than this science. Well, this brings great relief and comfort to apologetics. To every question concerning the being of things,—the soul, God, freedom and determinism, nature and miracles,—to all such questions, human reason must answer, in the manner of empiriological science, СКАЧАТЬ