Developmental Psychology and Man’s Knowledge of Being

DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY AND MAN'S KNOWLEDGE OF BEING PHILOSOPHERS AND PSYCHOLOGISTS in the twentieth century who reflect on man's knowledge-its scope and processes-generally deny to man the kind of metaphysical knowledge St. Thomas ascribes to him. In such a situation those who share Thomas's view that man has a capacity for, and an orientation to, a metaphysical knowledge of reality as being, do well to reflect upon man's knowledge in a way that is in close touch with contemporary thought. In this article I wish to do just that, to present an account of the psychogenesis of being that makes central use of contemporary psychologies of knowledge and has in view contemporary objections against man's metaphysical knowledge-albeit only in an exploratory manner, more to suggest its significance than to develop my theme with the fullness it deserves. To introduce this study, brief though it is, we must review something of the Thomistic analysis of man's understanding of being. There is no one universally accepted interpretation of Thomas's view on the way man knows reality as being. There is however widespread agreement that the existential judgment is proportioned to the knowledge of being as understood by Thomas, since for him being is that which is. Reality as being is reducible neither to substance nor to the act of being. If one accepts this, there still remains disagreement about the principles that account for such knowledge being present in man~ The main Thomistic view is that man's knowledge of the concretely existing sensible reality is primary in the genesis of such knowledge, and thus that both the concrete sensible reality and man's knowledge of it through sense, intellectual abstraction, and insight are the essential principles of this 668 PSYCHOLOGY AND MAN's KNOWLEDGE OF BEING 669 knowledge. But for many interpreters this cannot fully account for man's existential judgment, since sense knowledge and intellectual abstraction as such do not properly deliver esse or the act of being. In another place I have defended the view that for a full explanation of the existential judgment one has to recognize that the act of being is more properly the object of man's affective inclination and volitional act than of his intellectual insight mediated by sense knowledge and abstraction.1 As supportive of this view we may note that we place the infinitive form of the verb in a sentence as the direct object of a word or .expression referring to our acts of love, desire, and hate; for example, we say " I want to live." We normally express the direct object of an act of knowledge by a noun or a noun clause. If esse is more properly the object of affectivity and desire than of intellectual knowledge, the existential judgment and the knowledge of being proper to metaphysics is dependent in part on the intellectual knowledge we have through participation in our affective inclination, act, and its object-our own actualization (or act of being) as the good we seek, and other realities that are related to this or to which our actualization is related. The existential judgment is not fully explained by direct intellectual knowledge of concrete sensible reality through sense and abstraction. We need not review the major modern difficulties against this view of man's knowledge of being-such as those that come from Heidegger on the one hand or from an empiricism, rationalism , or constructivism on the other-to recognize that we need something like a contemporary " phenomenology " of knowledge if we are to evaluate Thomas's view in a way that meets the problems of our time.2 For such a contemporary analysis of man's knowledge I suggest that major attention should be paid to the developmental psychology of Jean Piaget, 1 See "Existence, the Intellect and the Will," The New Scholasticism, 29 (1955), 145-174, and "Man's Transcendence and Thomistic Resources," The Thomist, 38 (1974)' 426-484. 2 I examine these difficulties and suggest an approach to them in " Religious Reflection and Man's Transcendence," The Thomist, 37 (1973), 1-68. 670 JOHN FARRELLY and I suggest this in spite of his...