The Ontological Basis of Certitude

THE ONTOLOGICAL BASIS OF CERTITUDE FROM TIME TO TIME it is good to return to basics if for no other reason than to remind ourselves of their existence; for they constantly suffer obscurity from a jungle-growth of secondary considerations. A case in point is the enterprise of " transcendental Thomists " and other Scholastics who maintain that the " critical problem" must be the starting point for post-Cartesian philosophy, even for Thomistic realism.1- To be sure, given the modern philosophical climate , no realism can retain intellectual respectability without addressing itself to the question of the validation of our knowledge of extramental reality. Besides, as Maritain pointed out, philosophy is a wisdom and it is incumbent upon wisdom to defend its principles; in epistemology this requires a rational justification of our certain knowledge of extramental being.2 Thus one does not have to go to the extreme of Gilson's root and branch rejection of the possibility of a critical realism 8 to see that there are critiques and critiques, and that the recognition of the need for a critical Thomistic realism does not justify the enterprise of those professed Thomists who would vali:date realism by starting with knowledge or consciousness instead of being. As Father Henle has incisively shown in the case of Coreth,4 the latter's justification of Thomistic realism by the " transcendental method " consists in the end in an apiSee , e.g., Bernard J. F. Lonergan, Insight (New York: Philosophical Library , 1967), pp. xxvii-xxix. 2 Jacques Maritain, The Degrees of Knowledge. Transl. supervised by Gerald B. Phelan (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1959), pp. 73-75. a Etienne Gilson, Realisme Thomiste et Critique de la Oonnaissance (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1947). 4 Robert J. Henle, S.J., "Transcendental Thomism, A Critical Assessment" in One Hundred Years of Thomism, edited by Victor B. Brezik, C.S.B. (Houston: University of St. Thomas, 1981), pp. 90-116. lftO THE ONTOLOGICAL BASIS OF CERTITUDE 121 peal to the direct apprehension of sensible being, and all the elaborate neo-Kantian machinery of the conscious subject and the being of knowledge, etc., rather than justifying that apprehension or even leading up to it, is put on the shelf as the traditional Thomistic realism is trotted out to bring the critical problem to a happy conclusion. At the root of this discontinuity lurks the very difficulty that has bedeviled the neo-Kantians and all who have fallen prey to the Cartesian error of starting to philosophize by turning inward to knowledge or consciousness rather than outward to things: the infinite separation between the possible being of the conceptual world and the actual being of the existential world. No possibility exists of proceeding in demonstration from thought to thing. Also at the root of the discontinuityto put the matter in positive terms-looms the transcendentality of being; it is impossible to deny being because being is all there is and what is outside being is nothing. No sane person seriously doubts the existence of things outside himself. That is why Descartes's doubt is called " methodical doubt." Although the expression is not to be found in his writings, he himself did not doubt the existence of things, but his method was to accept nothing that could not be demonstrated as necessarily true or was not known to be such by the clarity and distinctness of its ideas.5 One result of the methodical doubt was to drive a wedge between common sense and philosophy, 5 " For these customary and long-standing beliefs will frequently recur in my thoughts, my long and familiar acquaintance with them giving them the right to occupy my mind against my will [and almost to make themselves masters of my beliefs]. I will never free myself of the habit of deferring to them and having faith in them as long as I consider that they are what they really are-that is, somewhat doubtful, as I have just shown, even if highly probable-so that there is much more reason to believe than to deny them. That is why I think that I wouid not do badly if I deliberately took the opposite position and deceived...