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The Degrees of Knowledge (The Collected Works of Jacques Maritain, Vol. 7)

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The work of a great mind

Out of the many books Jacques Maritain wrote, his Degrees of Knowledge can be considered as his Magnum Opus in the field of speculative philosophy. First published in 1932, it is his major work on the theory of knowledge, inspired by the philosophy of St Thomas Aquinas and the mystical works of St John of the Cross.

The whole purpose of the book is to make a synthesis between science, philosophy and theology. It has always been said that the vocation as a philosopher meant two things for Jacques Maritain: "the dignity of the human person and the restoration of the intellect". The first part of this project can be found in his works on social and political philosophy, like Integral Humanism and Man and State, etc. The other part led his philosophical activity gradually from his Bergsonian background to the critical realism of Thomas Aquinas.

The critical realism is to be found in the Degrees of knowledge which is Maritain's testimony of the second part of his philosopical vocation: the restoration of the intellect. Knowledge for Maritain contains two realms: natural and supernatural. The whole enterprise Maritain undertakes is to find an epistemology that embraces the full range of human knowledgde, from the simple knowledge of sense perception, to the supernatural knowledge, knowledge of the Divine essence.

The book is separated in two parts, a part about the degrees of natural knowledge and a part about the degrees of supranatural knowledge.

My intention is to represent the basic ideas of the book, I do not find myself able to criticize the book. Understanding what Maritain is trying to show, takes a lot of time, and I am still in the phase of understanding. This book deserves a honest and clear evauation, more than a simple good or bad label. The book contains more than 500 pages of text, in which a lot of very difficult material is presented. Let's be clear about it: The Degrees of Knowlegde is a very difficult book, and I think you need a decent philosophical training to understand it.

Degrees of rational knowledge

Let's look at the first part: the domain of natural knowledge. Natural knowledge is the domain of unaided reason, in which the intellect has as its formal object: being. Being is known by way of abstraction. Maritain dinstinguishes three degrees of abstraction. In the first degree of this process, the mind knows an object, which it disengages from the singular and contingent moment of sense perception, but is still in reference to the sensible. This first degree of abstraction belongs to physics and philosophy of nature. The second degree is the mathematical abstraction, in which the mind knows an object whose intelligibility no longer implies an intrinsic reference to the sensible, but to the imaginable. Finally, in the highest degree of intellectual vision, the metaphysical degree, the intelligibility is free from any intrinsic reference to the senses or imagination. This is the field of trans-sensible reality. The mind starts with knowledge from the sensible, and penetrates deeper and deeper in the mystery of reality by way of ascending towards objects of thought which both can be conceived and exist without matter, which is the domain of metaphysics. The three degrees are on a hierarchical line, in which the first participates in the third.

The kinds of knowledge which belong to the natural order are also called, the dianoetic knowledge: in which things are known in themselves; perinoetic knowledge, in which there is knowledge of essences by way of signs, or some measurable properties. And there is finally ananoetic knowledge, or knowledge by analogy. This is the domain of metaphysics in which the intellect ascends from sensible being to the knowledge of the first being, which is God. It is at the same time called: natural theology.

Also there is knowledge which belongs to the natural order, which is called knowledge by connaturality. This kind of knowledge is not by means of a concept, but knowledge by inclination. It can be found in moral knowledge, the work of the artist, and the knowledge we have of other persons. We are co-natured with our object.

Knowledge starts with sense perception, the intellect receives through the sense perception a concept, an intelligible similtude, on which the intellect makes a judgement. The concept is called a formal sign: that by which we know, a means by which we know the very nature of a thing. The thing exists and the formal object is grapsed by the intellect. The object has intentional being, the thing has natural being. The concept is a formal sign by which the intellect becomes the other as other. By way of the judgement, the intellect asserts the existence of the thing as an extramental being.

The judgement is an important aspect in the theory of knowledge. By way of the judgement we assert that our knowledge is not only about a phenomena, a mental thing, but by the judgement we confirm the existence of the extra-mental being, the correspondence of intellect and reality. Things can be known in themselves, the truth of knowledge consists in the conformity of the mind with the thing. Truth is possible but difficult for man to attain. It is therefore called critical realism.

So we can conclude that: Truth is the conformity of the mind with being. Knowledge is immersed in existence, given to us first by sense, sense attains the object as existing. Sense delivers existence to the intellect, it gives the intellect an intelligible treasure which sense does not know to be intelligible, and which the intellect knows as being.

The degrees of supra-rational knowledge

The second part of the book deals with supra-rational knowledge. It's about the knowledge of God. For Maritain, faith and reason are not conflicting. There is a great harmony between nature and grace. Again Maritain distinguishes in order to unite. There are three wisdoms. The first one belongs to the natural order, it is based on reason, the domain of metaphysics. It's the ananoetic knowledge, also called natural theology. Above the natural theology, stands the science of revealed mysteries, which is called theology. It is reason illuminated by faith. It's certitude is superior to metaphysics, because it has a divine origin. Then above all, there is the mystical wisdom or infused wisdom which consists in knowing the essentialy supernatural object of faith and theology, Deity as such, the expierence of God, in which we can know Him in His essence. Faith alone is not sufficient, it needs the gifts of the Holy Spirits and the theological virtues of faith and hope, infused moral virtues.

Some remarks

Like I said earlier, you need a decent philosophical training to understand the material presented. The book presupposes knowledge about the battle for the universal in the middle ages, the philosophy of Descartes, the tradition of idealism and logical positivism.

Maritain, the major neo-Thomist of the 20th century, has written a masterful tome on most epistemological accounts that is not only versed in "knowing that," and "knowing how," but also the knowledge derived from religious experience, mystical experience, and various other "degrees" of knowledge which, like a spider, are webbed together in a wonderful lattice of gemlike reflections. One will find all sorts of epistemological issues handled with care and illumination -- even ones modern analytic philosophy finds too "metaphysical," -- that most people encounter in the course of a lifetime. A delightful read and a great treasure for future reflection and meditation.

The 'Degrees of Knowledge' is considered Maritain's finest work, and I certainly agree. Several critical strands of Neo-Thomism come together in this book, and are creatively woven into a single whole.

Maritain along with several other thinkers resumed the intense recovery and revival of St Thomas's thought, especially within the challenge posed by Neo-Kantian idealism, Nietzschean nihilism and skepticism, Existentialism and Phenomeology, which all strongly denied the existence of God as traditionally conceived, or radically denied that any human knowledge of God or the unconditioned was possible.

The Degrees of Knowledge is basically then a very fundamental re-examination of one of the key ideas of philosophy, Being. By definition Being should encompass all things that exist, and also exclude what does not exist. But the success of modern science seems to challenge some philosophical ideas of Being, and require a new way of looking at it.

Maritain correctly points out the key to science is that it makes being quantifiable and divides Being into beings which can be measured and counted by number, relation and quality. Science then through theory, experiment and observation finds there are relationships between beings and these relationships are ordered and invariant under certain space-time transformations. The object of science then is essentially what Maritain calls the 'sensible real', the aspects of reality or Being that are visible and detectable to our senses and measurable.

Maritain as a Thomist though is also concerned to include the realm of the Absolute or spirit. He works out a number of ways of including God in the notion of Being along Thomistic lines, and also attempts to integrate mystical experience into man's understanding of Being. He studies St John of the Cross most intensely, and believes the 'dark night' can be considered as perfectly accurate and orthdox both from the viewpoint of Thomistic theology and metaphysics.

Many philosophers may be deeply skeptical about such a project, particularly analytical philosophers and logical positivists who tend to regard statements about religion, metaphysics or mysticism as essentially meaningless and devoid of content. However, in my view it represents a valuable attempt to recover the sense of holiness in Being and in taking religious experience into account while reviewing the medieval understandings of God and God's nature in light of the Kantian and Nietzschean challenges to metaphysical knowledge and the rise of science.

Personally while the Absolute must always transcend any concept we could have of it by nature of its infinity, I feel Maritain's attempt is a fine effort to understand how we can know God and approach him in this skeptical age.

I wish everyone involved in the philosophy of embodiment would read this so the fundamental errors (namely the omission of the notion of spirituality) could be corrected. If embodiment is truly about personal discovery and ultimate self-accountability then the epistemological exploration in this book will serve as a fantastic argument for incorporating spirituality into any philosophy of self.
There is so much in this book it will captivate the reader many times over.

If you fancy yourself a philosopher, I would assume you are familiar with this work. A giant of a work, possibly Maritain's masterpiece. The Introduction alone is sweetness to the scholar....

Picking up Degrees of Knowledge, I was expecting a very rational and logical philosophical text on what it is we can actually know in this world as opposed to what we can believe due to sufficient evidence. Unfortunately, having just finished this book in the past five minutes, I feel as though Maritain spent four-hundred pages confusing knowledge for faith and fact for revelation. Now, I am frustrated.

On the bright side, though, as I would rather start off by showcasing what I liked in any work, I will state that if Maritain had simply stuck to his critique on modern science, I would be rating his work with five-stars. For any who have read my somewhat caustic letter to Stephen Hawking, you understand my feelings toward theoretical physics and modern science in general. For those that have not, I will let my review of Maritain's views on such demonstrate:

"Three centuries of empirio-mathematicism have so warped the intellect that is no longer interested in anything, but the invention of apparatus to capture phenomena. By advancing in this fashion, not by linking new truths to already acquired truths, but by substituting new apparatus for outmoded apparatus; by handling things without understanding them; by gaining ground against the real bit by bit, patiently, through victories that are always piecemeal and provisory thus has the modern intellect developed within this lower order of scientific demiurgy a kind of manifold and marvelously specialized touch as well as wonderful instincts for the chase. But, at the same time, it has wretchedly weakened and disarmed itself in the face of proper objects of the intellect, which it has abjectly surrendered."

This precious gem is left to us by Maritain on just the third page of his tract. From there, for the next seventy-pages (sixty-nine to be precise), Maritain continues to call into question what is now known as "scientific knowledge", poking holes where they need to be poked and asking challenging questions to the scientific community. If, to paraphrase Maritain, science is the study of changing bodies, then:

"How could a changeable and contingent object give rise to a stable knowledge, one which could not be false?"

Further, Maritain looks at the Second Law of Thermodynamics in much the same way as I did when I read A Brief History of Time, and makes almost the exact same observation:

"Absolute chance is a contradictory notion. A crossing of preordained things, which itself is not preordained, supposes the things which are preordained."

Confusing? Yes; however, that question goes right to the heart of theoretical physics since the days of Einstein. As for Einstein, Maritain is not intimidated by the popular conception of the physicist as one of, if not the, smartest men in history:
The conceptions introduced by Einstein must accordingly be admired to the extent that they constitute a powerful physico-mathematical synthesis; but they must be rejected if given properly philosophical meaning.

To those who have yet to read Maritain's work, this denunciation might sound extremely mild; however, since Maritain states and believes unequivocally that philosophy is the highest and most perfect form of knowledge and that science, which he refers to as natural philosophy, is in its pure form (away from the perverse direction in which it has been taken in the past one-hundred years) a branch of philosophy, then one can see that Maritain is stating that Einstein's theories are garbage and are to be rejected as far as true knowledge is concerned.

Unfortunately, once Maritain leaves the world of science and begins to argue higher metaphysical questions, he also leaves the world of reason for the world of revelation. Maritain is a Catholic philosopher and his beliefs are his beliefs; however, he repeatedly states that pure knowledge cannot be gained except through grace. He then qualifies this grace by saying that only Christians, and presumably only Catholics, can hope to achieve such grace. Over the course of the final three-hundred pages, Maritain relies on testimony from Aquinas, Augustine, and St. John of the Cross to support his view.

I have no qualms with Maritain's theology; however, to cast out the idea that the only true philosophers, persons who embrace and are charged with finding truth through reason and logic, are Catholics who receive grace and revelation is a bit outdated, offensive, and, in my opinion, wrong.

Where Maritain not only blurs the line, but exterminates the line between reason and faith, I see that line as separating two distinct, yet at times complementary, disciplines. In my view, since I believe that reason can only go so far as to prove the possibility of a personal and present God, then I believe that is all that is required of philosophers toward any type of mysticism.
The reach from logic (a possible God) to faith (the Trinitarian Christian God, Allah, Yahweh, Brahma, etc.) is one that requires revelation. Since revelation cannot be argued (I cannot convince someone else to believe in something because I, not they, had a revelation; at the same time, that person cannot convince me out of my revelation), then it also should not be argued. Philosophers, above everyone else, should understand that point and respect it.

While disappointing, frustrating, and egotistic (one very much feels as though Maritain feels he has a privileged access to truth), the last three-hundred pages are also dull, redundant, and tedious. Aside from the first seventy pages, I cannot, in good conscience, recommend this to anyone.

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