Poetry, Beauty, and Contemplation: The Complete Aesthetics of Jacques Maritain

2. Theoretical Background: Maritain’s Philosophical Development

27 Two Theoretical Background Maritain’s Philosophical Development \ If I . . . am a Thomist, it is in the last analysis because I have understood that the intellect sees. —Jacques Maritain Bergson’s Philosophical Influence: Bergsonian Intuition Central to Maritain’s aesthetics and theory of creative activity is the role played by the intellect and human intelligence. The opening paragraph of Art and Scholasticism situates the term “art” as an intellectual virtue distinguished not only from the other intellectual virtues, but from the moral virtues as well. When we recall the biographical notes from the preceding chapter, this distinguishing characteristic comes as little surprise. The philosophical skepticism and scientific materialism that weighed upon Maritain as a young student were lifted initially by the Bergsonian notion of intuition that transported one into the very heart of the Real or the “Absolute”—a transcendent realm closed to the limits and confining constructs of concepts and the investigations of the empirical sciences. This initial “good news” from Bergson was followed shortly by the “Good News” of the Gospels, faith, and eventually the study of St.Thomas Aquinas. In his conversion, Maritain was among the early revolutionaries of his day; today, it is easy to lose sight of how “countercultural” his conversion to Catholicism and interest in St.Thomas were at that time.1 1. The same was also true for Aquinas and his study of Aristotle in the culture of thirteenth-century Paris. 28 [ Theoretical Background The specific effect of the ideas of Aquinas upon the development of Maritain’s philosophy will be discussed in the next section of this chapter. The initial formation and reorientation of his thinking came from his first contact with Bergson and Bergsonism. Bergson was Maritain’s senior by a mere twenty-three years. Born in the year of the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), Bergson grew intellectually in the latter part of the nineteenth century. This era was characterized by the inheritance of the still developing European tradition of modern philosophy and the consequent growth of materialism and positivism. Bergson’s own philosophy, like that of Maritain’s later, developed as a critical response to this pervasive scientism. Also, again like Maritain, Bergson was gifted with an artistic temperament that revealed itself in his writings.2 This artistic disposition and poetic writing style is likely to have struck a resonance in Maritain, thus accounting for some of Bergson’s initial appeal. The real attraction, however, was undoubtedly Bergson’s criticism of the materialist worldview of the scientists and the alternative theory of reality and epistemology he proposed. In spite of Maritain’s eventual criticism of Bergson’s ideas years later,3 initially they liberated the “metaphysical eros” Bergson’s enthusiastic admirer desired so ardently: “When Bergson revived the worth and dignity of metaphysics in the minds of his listeners, minds engaged to their sorrow by agnosticism or materialism, when he said, with an unforgettable emphasis, to those minds brought up in the most depressing pseudo-scientific relativism, ‘it is in the absolute that we live and move and have our being,’ it was enough that he should thus awaken in them a desire for metaphysics, the metaphysical eros: that was accomplishment enough.”4 2. From his father “who was an accomplished musician, he doubtless inherited something of the artistic temperament which is reflected throughout his books”; Thomas A. Goudge, “Introduction,” in Henri Bergson, An Introduction to Metaphysics (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1955), 9. 3. Jacques Maritain, Bergsonian Philosophy and Thomism. 4. Jacques Maritain, “The Metaphysics of Bergson,” in Ransoming the Time, trans. Harry Lorin Binsse (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1941), 53; this essay is also chapter 16 in the 1955 Philosophical Library Edition of Bergsonian Philosophy and Thomism. Ransoming the Time also appeared under the title Redeeming the Time (London : Geoffrey Bles/Centenary Press, 1944). Theoretical Background \ 29 It is against the background of the late nineteenth-century philosophical and scientific skepticism that one can best appreciate the Bergsonian critique of mind—in philosophy, against Descartes, Hume, and Kant; in science, against Darwin, Spencer, and Taine. From these sources , Bergson understood the prevailing attitudes concerning the knower’s relation to reality, the role of the mind in comprehending reality, and the role of concepts in representing reality. From Descartes, Bergson received the fundamental assumption of all subsequent modern theories of knowledge—namely, that the problem of knowledge, the “critical problem,” is...