Читать книгу Scholasticism and Politics - Jacques Maritain - Страница 12

The theory of experimental science offered by the Viennese suffers, in my opinion, from certain peculiar philosophical errors which especially concern the notion of logical work and the notion of sign. Logical work, by which the mind passes from one assertion to another by virtue of reasoning and of the connection of ideas, is not, as the Viennese believe, a simple tautological process, wherein we only transform different symbolic expressions of one same thought; it is not a simple reiteration of the same thought, for, in thinking, the mind passes from one truth to another truth.

The notion of sign does not concern our states of consciousness, our Erlebnisse, but objects independent of our subjective states, though constituted in their intelligibility proper by the activity of our intellect.

And, above all, the theory of science offered by the Viennese, suffers from a positivist purism, to which I will return later.

But, so far as a certain characteristic structure of science is concerned, this theory insists upon a fundamental truth which, in fact, the Viennese logicians have not discovered (rather they have received it from the scientists), and which is due to the self-awareness which modern science, and especially physics, has achieved. The truth is, that science—science in the modern sense of the word—is not a philosophy, and consequently claims, if I dare use this barbarism, to deontologize completely its notional lexicon.

This endeavour is more difficult than it may seem. There is something heroic about it. It implies a merciless struggle against language, because language is inevitably loaded with intelligence and with ontology. To consider, for instance, the prose of Joyce or the works of some of our contemporary poets, it is curious to observe how this desperate struggle against language currently characterizes two of the most typical and noblest impulses of spiritual endeavour, in very different fields, the scientific and the poetic. It might be that, truly speaking, the mystics alone are able to succeed in such a struggle: because the mystics have no need of language, at least in a certain zone and at certain moments of experience and actuation.

Let us end this digression. What I should like to note relative to the precise point which I have just indicated, is that the consideration of the sciences of phenomena, as they have developed in modern times,—novel, indeed, by relation to the cultural state of antiquity and the medieval world,—this consideration carried out in the light of the epistemological principles of St. Thomas Aquinas, would lead us to general views strikingly similar to those of the school of Vienna.

Let me sum up as briefly as possible the results which I reached myself, before having been informed of the works of the Viennese group.

What is essential, in my opinion, is both to repudiate the positivist conception of knowledge, which is a philosophical error, and also to take account of the understanding of themselves which the sciences of nature have achieved, a self-consciousness which is itself a spiritual reality, an extremely valuable fruit of experience, and which we cannot ignore without exposing ourselves to a serious mistake.

What is important, it seems to me, is to distinguish (and this the Viennese school has omitted to do) two ways of analysing the world of sensible reality and of constructing the concepts relevant thereto. I have given these two kinds of analysis of sensible reality the following names: the one, empiriological analysis; the other, ontological analysis.

If we observe any kind of material object, this object is, while we observe it, the meeting point, as it were, of two knowledges: sense knowledge and intellectual knowledge. We are in the presence of a kind of sensible flux, stabilized by an idea, by a concept. In other words, we are in the presence of an ontological or intelligible nucleus manifested by a set of qualities perceived here and now,—I do not say conceived, I say felt qualities, objects of actual perception and observation.

As to the sensible reality, considered as such, there will thus be a resolutio, a resolution of concepts and definitions, which we may call ascendant, or ontological, toward intelligible being,—a resolution in which the sensible matter always remains there and plays an indispensable role, but indirectly and at the service of intelligible being, as connoted by it; and there will be on the other hand a resolution descending towards the sensible matter, towards the observable as such, in so far as it is observable. Not that the mind ceases to refer to being,—for that is impossible, being always remains there,—but being passes into the service of what is sensible, of what is observable, and above all, of what is measurable. It becomes an unknown factor assuring the constancy of certain sensible determinations and of certain measures. In fact, the new aspect which modern science presents is precisely this descendant resolution, a procedure which the ancients had not thought of making an instrument of science.

In this empiriological analysis, characteristic of science in the modern sense of the word, the permanent possibility of sensible verification and of measurement plays the same part that essence does for the philosopher; the permanent possibility of observation and measurement is for the scientist equivalent to, and a substitute for, what essence is to the philosopher. One may here behold something like an effort against the natural slope of the intellect, because one must turn back, if one is to grasp what is essential and properly constitutive here, to the act of sense itself, to a physical operation to be performed, to an observation or a measurement. It is this observation to be made, this act of sense, which will serve to define the object.

If one understands this, one has understood the views of an Einstein, for instance, in physics, and the opposition more apparent than real between the philosopher and the scientist on such matters as time or simultaneity. This opposition is immediately solved, because the type of definition is essentially different in the two cases. For the physicist conscious of the epistemological exigencies of his discipline, science tends to construct definitions, not by essential ontological characters, but by a certain number of physical operations to be performed under fully determined conditions. On the other hand, all science tends in a certain way, and however imperfectly, to explanation and deduction, to a knowledge of the why. Therefore, empiriological science will necessarily be obliged to seek its explicative deductions in mere ideal constructions, though founded on the real, and which can be substituted, as well-founded explicative myths or symbols, for the entia realia, the real entities, those causes of ontological order which the intellect seeks when it follows its natural slope. Such an elaboration of ideal entities grounded in reality, the most significant examples of which are encountered in mathematical physics, but also in such non-mathematical disciplines as experimental psychology, and through which real causes are reached in a blind fashion—such an elaboration is linked to the aspect of art or fabrication, whose importance in empiriological science has often been observed with reason. The essence, the substance, the explicative reasons, the real causes, are thus reached in a certain fashion, in an oblique and blind manner, through substitutes which are well-grounded myths or symbols, ideal constructions, which the mind elaborates from the data of observation and measurement, and with which it goes out to meet things. Thus, these basic notions, primitively philosophical, are recast and phenomenalized.

It has been justly observed that in the image which the physicist makes of the world, ‘certain traits really express, not nature, but the structure of the real, and in this there is a certain adequation. For instance, the atom of Bohr signifies the table of Mendelieff; the undulatory theory signifies light’s interference.’¹ Thanks to ideal constructions, to entia rationis, the real is thus grasped.

I do not know how to translate this word, ens rationis; it designates certain objects of thought, as the universal, the predicate, the privation, the transfinite number, and so forth, which I conceive intelligibly, but which cannot exist outside my mind. Let us say, if you like, ideal entity or logical entity, or being of thought, or being made in the mind, being not expressing a reality (though possibly grounded in reality).

Certain facile minds, which imagine themselves strong, have often scoffed at the entia rationis of the Schoolmen. Yet here we have seen that the theory of the ideal entity grounded on reality alone furnishes us with an accomplished and satisfactory interpretation of the paradoxical twofold character—at the same time realist and symbolic—of the sciences of phenomena, which makes them appear, at first glance, so disconcerting.