From the Tree to the Labyrinth: Historical Studies on the Sign and Interpretation

by Umberto Eco

  (i) when our eyes rest upon a concrete object, our external senses receive by immutatio, or an act of receptivity on the part of the sentient bodily organ, the various qualitates sensibiles inherent in the object, classified as audibilia, visibilia, odorabilia, gustabilia and tangibilia—and they (our senses) receive them in the same way in which wax receives the imprint of the seal, as a species sensibilis, still a material phenomenon but already separate from the thing itself, and, so to speak, with a different makeup, “ut forma coloris in pupilla, quae non fit per hoc colorata” (“like the form of a color in the pupil of the eyes, which is not on that account colored”) (Summa Theologiae I, 78, 3);

  (ii) the external senses transmit this species sensibilis to the internal senses (sensus communis, phantasia, memoria, vis aestimativa, or cogitativa);

  (iii) common sense composes and reunites the various data received from the external senses and elaborates the kind of iconic image of the object known as the phantasma, which is received in the repository of forms or thesaurus formarum of the phantasia;

  (iv) it is at this point that the agent intellect comes into the picture, abstracting from the phantasma (which displays all of the qualities of the object, including those that are accidental or individual) the species intelligibilis, which is no longer individual but universal (Stone, Tree, Human Being) and offering it to the Possible Intellect as locus specierum, which recognizes the quidditas of the object, elaborates its universal concept, and performs other operations of elaboration of what was offered to it;17

  (v) there is of course nothing secret about these essential characteristics, but they are inscribed in the simple and immediate figure—considered as this topological terminatio—of the object, since they are at one and the same time its principle of existence and its principle of definability. Point v is fundamental if we are to grasp the full extent of the license taken by Maritain;

  (vi) the intellect has only one way to reconsider the characteristics of the concrete object with which the cognitive process began, and it does so through the reflexio ad phantasmata; in this reconsideration it certainly knows all of the individual characteristics of the object (in the sense that it “sees” them, so to speak, in the phantasma), though it cannot be said that it enters into contact with the individual object, because cognitum est in cognoscente per modum cognoscentis (“the known is in the knower in ways peculiar to the knower”), and the phantasma is not a material entity like the object. When the external senses received an impression of heat, they “felt” heat by immutatio or immutation. When the intellect performs the reflexio ad phantasmata or abstraction from phantasms, it “knows” that the object was hot, but it does not “feel” it.18

  There is no direct connection between the image in the pupil and the concrete stone. Therefore, in the context of Thomas’s epistemology a sort of transparent diaphragm is created situated between the intellect, the organ of abstraction, and the individual object, with all the properties that accrue to it from being made concrete in a materia signata quantitate (“quantatively determined matter”).

  To bridge this gap that occurs in every act of perception, the intellect has but one recourse: on the basis of what it “sees” in the phantasma, it is able to proceed to judgments (“this stone has such and such dimensions, it lies in such and such a place, it is illuminated by the sun, etc.”). Therefore, in order to speak of the concrete stone, no act of intuition is involved (in Thomistic epistemology intuition does not exist), but an act of judgment, laborious, slow, agonizing, and painstaking.19 Nevertheless, even if we resolve the question in these terms, we cannot deny that Thomas does not provide a satisfactory theory of knowledge of the individual—and consequently thinkers like Duns Scotus and Ockham will be led to seek other solutions.20

  Hence, it is not possible that for Thomas the illuminating power of the intellect should instantaneously penetrate the individual recesses of the stone, seizing its eternal form in the quick of the matter with which it is imbued, in a unity that precedes the distinctions of reason, in an original and profound contact with the real, individualized in a form and made sensible in a matter dense with echoes and reverberations. Pace Maritain, Thomas’s intellect cannot be identified with the profligacy of an intuition (in the modern sense of the term, and provided this idea of intuition remains viable and that we do not embrace Peirce’s anti-intuitionist polemic) that seizes the veining of a piece of fruit, the nuances of a sunset, the texture of a layer of paint, and discovers in them the presence of that profound unity by means of which everything hangs together and is permeated by the same indivisible spiritual presence.21

  We might be tempted to think that Maritain—who had few qualms, despite the four centuries that separate the two, about turning with a certain insouciance from Thomas to John—is attributing to the former what he finds in his Counter-Reformation disciple. But when we go back and read the pages (Cursus III, 10, 4, pp. 322 et seq.) that John devotes to this very question of how the intellect is able to know singular material things, we observe that the disciple does not in fact break with the teachings of his master, but on the contrary, with the example of the Scotist “heresy” before his eyes, he ups the ante: “Non potest intellectus dirette ferri ad haec objecta prout modificata illis materialibus conditionibus, quae singularizant, se prout ad illis abstractis.” It is only through the senses that an object is apprehended in its material particularities. When it is grasped “per modum quidditatis” (“in the mode of a definable character”) by the intellect, then it is grasped “sine materialibus conditionibus loci et temporis etc” (“without the material conditions of place and time”) (p. 325). To know means to abstract and to tend toward the individuation of the quidditas, setting aside those material particularities that make the object something singular. It is not so much that the intellect cannot grasp the singular; it cannot grasp the material that singularizes the object. John is citing Thomas (Summa Theologiae I, 86, 1 ad 3), where he says that “singulare non repugnat intelligibilitati inquantum est singulare, sed inquantum est materiale, quia nihil intelligitur nisi immaterialiter” (“the singular is incompatible with intelligibility not insofar as it is singular, but insofar as it is material, for nothing can be understood except immaterially”).

  In Maritain’s account of the function of the agent intellect, when confronted with a concrete object such as a stone it confines itself to understanding “stone” and nothing else. For, if we insist on translating its function into modern terms, it has nothing to do with a preconscious activity of the soul, but constitutes at most the transcendental possibility of conferring a form on the data of the senses. Naturally, since Thomas is not Kant, the agent intellect does not “confer” anything of its own accord, it simply “recognizes” what was already there in the object but which, without its abstraction, would remain unknowable.

  Now Maritain, in spite of being aware of all of the limitations of the Thomistic concept of the agent intellect, tends nevertheless to define this “fundamental source of light” as “hidden in the unconscious of the spirit.” And in so doing, what he means by unconscious is what is instead formal (or, in Kantian terms, transcendental). That the effect of the operation of the agent intellect (that is, the concepts of all the things that I see and recognize according to universal species) may be repressed and stored in the psychological unconscious is a phenomenon that concerns psychology, not the theory of knowledge—and in any case it concerns modern psychology, not the psychology of Thomas. Failure to insist on this distinction means taking the agent intellect for something that it is not.

  To say that “we know what we are thinking, but not how we are thinking” may be ad mentem Divi Thomae; but this does not make it legitimate to affirm that our knowledge is therefore the beginning of an intuition, at least insofar as we attribute this conclusion to Thomas. If intuition is a nondecomposable act, a swift vision of the spirit, intuition has nothing to do with knowledge ad mentem Divi Thomae, precisely because the act of knowledge in
Thomas is decomposable—swift, instantaneous, if you will, but decomposable. Whereas we, in other words people who perceive and think every day, “know what we are thinking, but not how we are thinking,” Thomas’s philosophy knows perfectly well (or presumes to know) how we are thinking and demonstrates how, breaking it down (or decomposing it) into each of its successive phases.

  And if an act is decomposable, where does intuition come in, the category that philosophy has come up with to designate those acts that are not decomposable—rationalizable through a series of successive moments that render them by that very token a form of discourse?

  Thomas, as Maritain realizes, speaks of knowledge by connaturality apropos of mystical knowledge.22 But, in extending the concept to the aesthetic experience (in saying, in other words, that aesthetic experience is a form of mystical experience or vice versa), the Paleo-Thomist runs a twofold risk. The first is for the aesthetic experience to seem closer to the noche oscura of the mystics than to the ordered Scholastic vision—and, if he were not determined to be seen as a Paleo-Thomist at all costs, Maritain might even admit it, since this after all is the position he arrives at. The second is for a position typical of the modern mind—and of the modern mind with which Maritain ought to find himself least in agreement—to be taken as implicit: namely, that for contemporary man there is only one type of mystical relationship—the aesthetic relationship—left (because God is probably dead). And this would be fin-de-siècle aestheticism. Stephen Dedalus’s confession at the end of Joyce’s Portrait points to no other conclusion. How does Maritain the Paleo-Thomist get there? He gets there in an ambiguous way, especially as far as his Thomism is concerned.

  The same mystical emphasis reappears when Maritain revisits another typically Thomistic (but not exclusively Thomistic) notion—that of beauty as a transcendental property of being (which implies the realizability of value at all levels of existence, albeit in analogical form). Maritain distinguishes between poetry—defined as the primary intuition with its correlative expressive impulse—and beauty. And the latter appears to him as a kind of ever-receding goal which poetry is constantly trying to catch up with, without ever completely succeeding. The poetic impulse brings into play the artistic capability, but this process always retains an element of the inchoate; it is never resolved in a final conquest but remains instead in a permanent state of tension—which is mystical or Platonic in nature. This tension could also be inferred from Thomas’s doctrine of the transcendental nature of the beautiful, but only if Thomistic philosophy were to nurture such an anxiety in the face of the infinite that the presence of the analogia entis proved to be no longer satisfactory, and man were to seek, diabolically, by the roundabout routes of poetry, to violate a threshold that negative theology never crosses. A medieval notion if you will, though late medieval, typical of the Flemish and German mystics.

  For Thomas, the beautiful is that “in cuius aspectu seu cognitione quietatur appetitus” (“in whose sight or cognition the appetite is quieted”), whereas the appetite for the infinite is never quieted in a mystic like Meister Eckhart: “nihil tam distans a quolibet quam ejus oppositum. Deus autem et creatura opponuntur ut unum et innumeratum opponuntur numero et numerato et numerabili” (In Sapientiam, VII, 14).23

  Maritain’s frequent citations from Poe and Baudelaire, as well as from other twentieth-century poets, are evidence of just how “modern” his anxieties are; but they fail to support his claim to be recovering Thomism. In point of fact, there is no need to go all the way back to medieval philosophy to clarify Maritain’s position; we must look instead to the core of Romantic aesthetics. We need only reread what Schelling, an author cited by Maritain, had to say about art (Werke I, III). All of philosophy, according to Schelling, has its origin in an absolute principle that cannot be grasped or communicated through descriptions and concepts, but can only be intuited. This intuition is the “organ of philosophy.” But since it is an intellectual intuition not a sensible one, it is a purely interior intuition, which can become objective only as a consequence of a second intuition—aesthetic intuition. Furthermore, if aesthetic intuition is intellectual intuition made objective, then art is the only true organ, and at the same time document, of philosophy, bearing constant and continual witness to what philosophy cannot represent externally, that is, the unconscious as it operates and produces. This is the root of the theoretical position spelled out in Creative Intuition.

  In a form that has had such a telling influence on contemporary sensibility, especially in the Anglo-Saxon cultural circles that influenced the later Maritain, this same doctrine is to be found in Coleridge, as was usefully pointed out by Mayoux (1960).24 It is not merely a question of similarities. Maritain is drawing on an entire tradition that nourished the poetry of the last two centuries (it is no accident in fact that he frequently cites Coleridge), and, though he may invoke Saint Thomas, he is in fact getting closer and closer to the spirit of Romantic idealism: a paradoxical conclusion that he would no doubt be reluctant to accept, but that a conscientious exegesis cannot set aside pro bono pacis.

  A reader of Creative Intuition unaware of its medieval allusions would certainly be fascinated by the whole conception of poetry as a magical act and would have to concede that it is defended with considerable rhetorical ability. But what is disturbing is the specious use of a thinker from the past to support the author’s own theoretical position.

  Still, what we have here, rather than a case of intellectual dishonesty, is a rather primitive conception of historiography. When someone operates with the metaphysical, historiographical, and methodological conviction that there exists only one philosophy and that that philosophy is a philosophia perennis, then the historiographical dimension, as understood by the modern philosopher, heir to historicism, ceases to exist. Nor is the initial act by which the attribute of perenniality is bestowed on a given historically determined philosophy an historiographical act: because its purpose is not to circumscribe the character of an historical phenomenon but to enunciate a truth regarding the nature of human thought.

  Maritain’s method of reading his medieval sources has a lot in common with that of the medieval philosopher who declared his respect for the auctoritas of the Fathers while claiming to be a dwarf on a giant’s shoulders. When a medieval thinker was convinced of the truth of an assertion, he bolstered its legitimacy by claiming that it was to be found in his auctores. The most creative medieval philosophers, however, never recognized anything as true simply because it had been handed down from the Fathers. If anything, they did the opposite—when they found something they believed was true, they attributed it to the Fathers. They believed implicitly, then, not that everything that was part of tradition was true, but that everything that was true was part of tradition. Maritain does the same: attuned to all the subtleties of the modern sensibility, he welcomes its suggestions, attributing them, however, without further ado, to the sensibility of the Middle Ages. This behavior hides in fact an unconscious historicist conviction, which holds that the timeless treasure of truth grows and that the true Saint Thomas is not the Saint Thomas of the thirteenth century, for whom creative intuition does not exist, but the Saint Thomas of the twentieth century, who is now speaking through the lips of his faithful disciple. Philosophia is then perennis, not because, once formulated, it no longer changes, but precisely because it is constantly changing, and its definitive formulation always belongs to tomorrow. Which is an acceptable conclusion too, as long as it is made unequivocally clear (and even if, by making it clear, the appeal to the notion of a philosophia perennnis no longer has any meaning).

  8.6. The Historiographical Lesson of De Bruyne

  The extent of Maritain’s historiographical highhandedness becomes clear when we compare it with the work of another author who, though likewise a Catholic and a Thomist by formation, was nonetheless able, in his work as a historian, to keep a distance between his own thought and that of the authors he studied. That author was Edgar De Bruyne.
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br />   De Bruyne published his Études d’esthétique médiévale in 1946. In 1940 he had brought out his Philosophie van de Kunst and in 1942 Het Aestetisch beleven and De Philosophie van Martin Heidegger. It is impossible to believe that a work of the amplitude of the Études (around 1,200 pages in the 1998 Albin Michel edition) could have been composed in the space of the three intervening years—years that were in any case among the most terrible and turbulent in Belgian history. What we had was instead the fruit of over a decade of research. The problems of medieval aesthetics had already been the subject, as we will see, of an essay De Bruyne wrote in 1930. But even making allowance for decades of work we can only marvel at how such a vast quantity of material, often unearthed in out-of-the-way pages of hundreds of works from Boethius to Duns Scotus, could have been assembled by a single man in such a brief span of time. Furthermore, let us not forget that at that time electronic searches and scanning technology did not exist, and all the material had to be laboriously hunted down in the thousands of pages of the Patrologia Latina, not to mention the other sources, and diligently catalogued (by hand, one imagines, working in goodness knows what monastic libraries). So we can’t help smiling at the reaction, when the work appeared, of a number of critics who reproached De Bruyne for stopping at Duns Scotus and not considering Byzantine culture, for not citing Focillon and even for producing an anthology of quotations without arriving at a theoretical synthesis—thank heaven is all we can say, considering where the desire for a theoretical synthesis had led Maritain.25

  To assess the impact of the work on the historiography of medieval aesthetics we have only to conduct a brief bibliographical survey. Croce consecrated 398 pages of his Aesthetics (1902[1950]) to the history of the problem: of these pages only four were devoted to the Middle Ages, and only to conclude that “almost all the tendencies of ancient aesthetics were continued through tradition and reappeared by spontaneous generation in the medieval centuries,” but “it could be affirmed that the literary and artistic doctrines and opinions of the Middle Ages, with a few minor exceptions, are more valuable for the history of culture than for the general history of the science of aesthetics” (1902[1950]: 129).