A Via Maritainia: Nonconceptual Knowledge by Virtuous Inclination

The Thomist 62 (1998): 75-96 A VIA MARITAINIA: NONCONCEPTUAL KNOWLEDGE BY VIRTUOUS INCLINATION DONALD F. HAGGERTY Mount St. Mary's Seminary Emmitsburg, Maryland I SIGNIFICANT ASPECT of Jacques Maritain's originality s a Catholic philosopher was his ability to discern nalogous patterns of operation in disparate areas of human knowledge. One example ofthis resourcefulness involved proposing a nonconceptual cognitive process to explain poetic knowledge, mystical knowledge, and knowledge of the natural law. In all three instances, according to Maritain, the arrival at an act of knowing does not depend on the abstractive power of the intellect. Instead the customary role of the concept as a cognitional sign is replaced by an alternative vehicle for the realization of knowledge. The cognitive medium is different in each case--creative emotion, supernatural charity, or natural inclinations, respectively. But the common pattern in Maritain's analysis was to posit a reservoir of intelligent preconceptual activity beneath consciousness as the origin and ground for the eventual knowledge grasped in conscious awareness. While Maritain pursued these topics with notable distinction, he left some intriguing questions still uninvestigated. A case in point is the relation of prudential knowledge to a nonconceptual process of cognition. The invitation is clearly present because of the connection between prudence and a virtue-modified appetitive life. To function effectively as the intellectual virtue it is, prudence requires an ordering of the appetites to their proper 75 76 DONALD F. HAGGERTY human ends. The moral virtues provide this rectitude of inclination within the appetites, but by means of interior attractions or repulsions not always consciously adverted to. These tendential movements remain vital and operative in the appetites as a dynamic a priori structure of interior inclination before any formal choice of action takes place. The result is to predispose the person of advanced virtue to lean in the direction of virtuous action prior to any conscious deliberation over existential options of choice.1 The question arises whether the interior dynamisms residing in the appetitive life provide a type ofunderlying cognitive source for the prudential knowledge eventually grasped in concrete instances of moral choice. Though St. Thomas Aquinas did not write expansively on the matter, at two places in the Summa Theologiae he gives support to this possibility when he describes a practical knowledge linked to appetitive predispositions. He contrasts a twofold manner of judgment: one by way ofdiscursive reasoning and the other by way of "a certain connaturality." In the first case a correct judgment concerning a moral matter, such as chastity, depends on acquired learning after sustained inquiry into moral science. Intellectual activity is the pathway to such knowledge, which produces mere intellectual conformity with a moral truth grasped in conceptual formulation by a "perfect use of reason."2 In this instance it is possible for the intellect to achieve knowledge of chastity while the person is at the same time devoid of the actual virtue. On the other hand, a person who possesses virtue, writes St. Thomas, "judges rightly of what concerns that virtue by his very inclination towards it."3 Thus the 1 In a number of places Aquinas stresses the necessity of moral virtue rectifying the appetites as a precondition for prudence to judge well and command virtuous choices. For example, STh 1-11, q. 57, a. 4: "Ad prudentiam, quae est recta ratio agibilium, requiritur quod homo sit bene dispositus circa fines; quod quidem est per appetitum rectum. Et ideo ad prudentiam requiritur moralis virtus, per quam fit appetitus rectus" (cf. STh I-II, q. 58, a. 2; 1-11, q. 65, a. 1; 11-11, q. 47, a. 13, ad 2). 2 STh II-II, q. 45, a. 2: "Rectitudo autem judicii potest contingere dupliciter: uno modo, secundum perfectum usum rationis; alio modo, propter connaturalitatem quamdam ad ea de quibus jam est judicandum. Sicut de his quae ad castitatem pertinent per rationis inquisitionem recte judicat ille qui didicit scientiam moralem: sed per quamdam connaturalitem ad ipsa recte judicat de eis ille qui habet habitum castitatis." 3 STh I, q.1, a. 6, ad 3: "Cum judicium ad sapientem pertineat, secundum duplicem modum judicandi dupliciter sapientia dicitur. Contingit enim aliquem judicare uno modo per modum inclinationis, sicut...