Something on Maritain's "Intuition of Being" and the Gilsonian line of criticism

Metaphysics and first philosophy

I'm sure this generation of philosophers will be considered uniquely ahistorical and almost astonishingly devoid of a proper anchoring in the ancient forerunners and lecacy traditions, but if something useful can come from this deficit, it may be that we're simply too dumb to get stuck in certain crucial errors of our much more subtle and brilliant forerunners.

We get to take certain shortcuts that sometimes happen to just work out fine.

'The external conditions', writes Einstein, 'which are set for [the scientist] by the facts of experience do not permit him to let himself be too much restricted, in the construction of his conceptual world, by the adherence to an epistemological system. He, therefore, must appear to the systematic epistemologist as a type of unscrupulous opportunist, ' and he warned that a good joke (such as the considerations leading to the special theory of relativity) should not be repeated too often.

(Feyeravend, P. Against Method.)

And with this in mind, I think there's a sense in which Maritain's intuition of being (when existence as such is arguably accessible as an intelligible form which also then indirectly anchors all of logic and metaphysics) is neither as precarious or complicated as he himself maintains, nor as potentially problematic as critics like Gilson argued.

I think the problem is that Maritain almost loads this idea with something akin to sensus divinitatis, which is also connected to why Gilson sees severe problems in the suggestion since he feels this would possibly lead to the position that God in a sense could be fully possessed through reason.

But Maritain doesn't have to do this. If we just go by the route of other phenomenologists like Edith Stein (or even classical thomists like Garrigou-Lagrange), we can simply say that the intellection of being is immediately possible through a rational subtraction of everything from intellective awareness (of anything) until we reach the very foundation of being's (being as such) distinction from nothingness, which is the last thing we can know before there's no thing left.

So you just remove everything intelligible from anything whatsoever, until you reach the point where it doesn't even have intelligible or definite form, but just the universal possibility of form (which is just being/existence).

There's no special, unique inspiration needed for this kind of intellective awareness as Gilson argues, but rather just something like the phenomenological approach of Stein, which is also reflected in Garrigou-Lagrange's thought:

And Aquinas’ and Aristotle’s approach can be understood in the same manner.

[It’s like if we peel away every layer of detailed understanding of the character of what we experience – we just turn the resolution down and down and down until we’re at the very bottom of intelligible reality and we have no idea whatsoever what the thing actually is – we can no longer form any concept of what sort of thing we’re dealing with.

But the very last thing we can drop before there’s no longer any comprehension at all, is the fact that we’re dealing with something. That we’re dealing with a thing. And this is exactly what Aquinas means when he says that the first thing, or rather, the most basic thing, that the mind comprehends intellectually is BEING or EXISTENCE in the universal sense. We understand the thingliness of the thing before we understand the character or “thisness” of the thing, if you will.]

And with this, it seems to me that Maritain's project can be successful without any undue conflation with "special inspiration" (I'm just simply and stupidly throwing it out — I don't know why he thought he needed it, and it has a kind of elitist atmosphere as well) that underwrites the criticism of thinkers like Gilson — IF AND ONLY IF we maintain the distinction between divine and created being through an emphasis on their merely analogical and not literal likeness.

This is probably the precise point on which the potential dissonance between Gilson & traditional Thomism as opposed to Maritain’s approaches resides, and must be addressed by an appropriate metaphysics of analogy.

You will also see why the intuition of the principle of identity, every being is what it is, being is being, can possess such value for the metaphysician, can become the object of his enraptured contemplation. Common sense—and therefore the man in the street—makes use of the principle without scrutinising it. “A cat is a cat” says common sense—what more could it say?—so that, if the philosopher comes on the scene and enunciates the principle of identity in front of common sense, the latter will not see it, but will merely have the impression that an insignificant commonplace has been affirmed, in fact a tautology.

The philosopher, on the other hand, when he enunciates the principle of identity enunciates it as an expression of the metaphysical intuition of being, and thus sees in it the first fundamental law of reality itself, a law which astounds him because it proclaims ex abrupto, the primal mystery of being, its combination of subsistence and abundance, a law which is exemplified by objects in an infinite number of different modes, and applied with an infinite variety. It is not as the result of a logistic process that the metaphysician perceives and employs the principle of identity, so that it compels him to reduce everything to a pure identity, that is to say to obliterate all the diversities and varieties of being. For it is with its mode of analogical realisation that he apprehends the principle.

When he apprehends being as such, being according to its pure intelligible nature, he apprehends the essentially analogous value of the concept of being which is implicitly manifold and is realised in diverse objects in such fashion as to admit differences of essence between them, complete and vast differences. The principle of identity secures the multiplicity and variety of objects. Far from reducing all things to identity, it is the guardian of universal multiplicity, the axiom of being’s irreducible diversities.

If each being is what it is, it is not what other beings are.

(Maritain, J. A Preface to Metaphysics.)