"On the Use of Philosophy" by Jacques Maritain - Interesting Quotes

Stephen Alexander Beach

Sorry this post is not really a complete post as I usually attempt to do. Rather, it is a collection of quotes that may be useful in my dissertation. Overall, though, this was a collection of three essays. The first dealt with possible uses of philosophy in today's world, the second on the relationship of different faiths and how they should view one another, and third on the limited view of science that we have today. 

Useful Quotes 

"For a new scientific theory completely changes the very manner in which the former ones posed the question, whereas philosophical problems remain always the same, in one form or another. Nay more, basic philosophical ideas, once they have been discovered, become permanent acquisitions in the philosophical heritage." (6) 

"... our practical decisions depend on the stand we take on the ultimate questions that human thought is able to ask. That is why philosophical systems, which are directed toward no practical use and application, have, as I have remarked at the beginning, such an impact on human history" (7) 

"... philosophy, in its primary task, which is the metaphysical penetration of being..." (8) 

"As a matter of fact, the common psyche of a society or a civilization, the memory of past experiences, family and community traditions, and the sort of emotional temperament, or vegetative structure of feeling, which have been thus engendered, may maintain in the practical conduct of men a deep-seated devotion to standards and values in which their intellect has ceased to believe." (11) 

"At least I would like to insist on the remark that the constantly renewed controversies between philosophers bear witness to the necessity of the search for a superior and all-pervading truth. The more deeply we look into these controversies the more we realize that they thrive on a certain number (increasing with the progress of time) of basic themes to which each newly arriving philosopher endeavors to give some kind of place..." (29) 

"The greater and truer a philosophy, the more perfect the balance between all the ever-recurrent basic themes with whose discordant claims philosophical reflection has to do." (30) 

"Modern science has progressively 'freed' or separated itself from philosophy (more specifically from the philosophy of nature) thanks to mathematics - that is to say by becoming a particular type of knowledge whose data are facts drawn by our senses or instruments from the world of nature, but whose intelligibility is mathematical intelligibility. As a result, the primary characteristic of the approach to reality peculiar to science may therefore be described in the following way: that which can be observed and measured, and the ways through which observation and measurement are to be achieved, and the more or less unified mathematical reconstruction of such data - these things alone have a meaning for the scientist as such." (46) 

"Modern science of phenomena has its feet on earth and uses its hands to gather not only correctly observed and measured facts, but also a great many notions and explanations which offer our minds real entities; yet it has its head in a mathematical heaven, populated with various crowds of signs and merely ideal, even not intuitively thinkable entities." (48) 

"Nothing is more rational than the kind of extension of Niels Bohr's 'principle of complementarity' implied by the cast of mind of these scientists. For, thus extended, this principle means simply that in two different fields of knowledge, or at two specifically distinct levels in our approach to reality, two different aspects in existing things (the phenomenal and the ontological aspect) call for two different explanations (for instance 'Man's cerebral activity is stimulated by such or such chemical' and 'Man has a spiritual soul') - which are moreover perfectly compatible, since they have to do with two essentially diverse objects to be grasped in things ..." (51) 

"As a result, if they are not of positivist persuasion, and do not think that all we can know if phenomena alone, in other words, if, recognizing that phenomena are but as aspect of a deeper reality, they endeavor to go beyond phenomena, they do so through an extrapolation of scientific notions which, brilliant as they may be, is essentially arbitrary; or, looking for a 'noetic integrator,' they borrow it from some kind of metaphysics unaware of itself and disguised as science - and there is no worse metaphysics than disguised metaphysics." (53)
[I'm thinking as an example here, "brute facts" and "emergent properties".]

"If a liberal scientist undertakes to go beyond the horizons of science and tackle the philosophical aspects of reality, he too is liable to yield to the temptation of making the concepts worked out by science into the very components of he meta-scientific enterprise. The trouble is that one can no more philosophize with non-philosophical instruments than paint with a flute or piano." (54)

"The crucial question for our age of culture is, thus, whether reality can be approached and known, not only 'phenomenally' by science, but also 'ontologically' by philosophy." (56) 

[Good quote for the intro]

"For the impact of the habits of thinking prevalent in an industrialized civilization, in which manipulation of the world through science and technique plays the chief part, results in a loss of the sense of being in the minds of a large number of people, who are not scientists but grant rational value to facts and figures only." (56)

"...philosophy makes us grasp, with greater stability paid for by limitation to essentials, what things are in the intrinsic reality of their being." (57) 

"Thus matter (that is, material substances) is composed, in the eyes of old but still valid Aristotelian hylomorphism, of two elements: pure and indetermined potentiality (materia prima), and determinative form or entelechy (which in man, is spiritual soul);" (58) 

"Being, furthermore, is not limited to the field of sense experience; it goes beyond. And the basic concepts of reason which deal with being as such, even though they apply first to the realm of experience, can apply too - in an 'analogical' manner - to realities which transcend experience. As a result philosophy (this time I do not mean the philosophy of nature, I mean metaphysics) can attain to realities which escape sense experience and sense verification, in other words which belong to the spiritual or 'supra-sensible' order." (59) 

"Descartes believed that from the sole idea of an infinitely perfect being the existence of this being necessarily followed (the so-called 'ontological argument'). Kant rightly stated that such 'proof' was no proof at all. But he also stated - quite mistakenly - that all other proofs of God's existence implied the validity of the ontological argument and rested on it; as a result, no valid proof was possible. And Kant's successors followed on Kant's heels. Yet it is crystal clear that Thomas Aquinas' five ways do not start from the idea of an infinitely perfect being; they proceed in the opposite manner; they start from certain facts, quite general and quite undeniable; and from these facts they infer the necessary existence of a First Cause - which is infinitely perfect. Infinite perfection is at the end, not at the beginning of demonstration." (64) 

"Now how would things be intelligible if they did not proceed from an intelligence? In the last analysis a Prime Intelligence must exist, which is itself Intellection and Intelligibility in pure act, and which his first principle of the intelligibility and essences of things, and causes order to exist in them, as well as an infinitely complex network of regular relationships, whose fundamental mysterious unity our reason dreams of rediscovering in its own way." (66)

[Connection of identities.]

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1 - Maritain, Jacques. On The Use of Philosophy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961.