8.5. Creative Intuition vs. Agent Intellect
And so we come at last to a book like Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry (1953), meditated and composed in an English-speaking context by a more mature Maritain, enriched by his intense experience as a reader of contemporary poetic texts and partially weaned from his strict deference to the texts of the Middle Ages.14
Here Maritain no longer presents himself as an interpreter of Saint Thomas but as an autonomous thinker, developing the concept of poetry as revelation already outlined in his previous essays.
By Poetry I mean … that intercommunication between the inner being of things and the inner being of the human Self which is a kind of divination. (3)
In other words, poetry obliges us to consider the intellect both in its secret well-springs inside the human soul and as functioning in a nonrational (I do not say antirational) or nonlogical way. (4)
The integral conclusion must, therefore, it seems to me, be set forth as follows: On the one hand, as we have seen apropos of Oriental art, when art only intent on Things succeeds in revealing Things and their hidden meanings, it does also reveal obscurely, despite itself, the creative subjectivity of the artist.… On the other hand, when art primarily intent on the artist’s Self succeeds in revealing creative subjectivity, it does also reveal obscurely Things and their hidden aspects and meanings—and with greater power of penetration indeed, I mean into the depths of this Corporeal Being itself and this Nature that our hands touch.… Our descriptive and inductive inquiry suggests that at the root of the creative act there must be a quite particular intellectual process, without parallel in logical reason, through which Things and the Self are grasped together by means of a kind of experience or knowledge which has no conceptual expression and is expressed only in the artist’s work. (33–34)15
Nevertheless, in spite of the fact that this theory of poetic knowledge is patently in conflict with the medieval conception of art as recta ratio factibilium (“right judgment regarding things to be made”), as an intellectual creation, that is, which adheres to certain rules, Maritain, revealing an unsuspected acrobatic talent, endeavors to demonstrate that his position is not in conflict with Thomistic theory. Although, for the Middle Ages, art was a virtue of the practical intellect, for Maritain the set of rules by which the intellect operates are not rules ossified into a canon that antedates the creation of the work. This is where the notion of “creative intuition” comes in, superimposing itself on the canonical rules of making and breathing new life into them by virtue of an act that proceeds from the depths of the spirit.
There is no need to stress the fact that it is precisely this concept of an intuitive moment permeating the action and superimposing itself on the rules that is nowhere to be found in Thomas’s aesthetics. Maritain seems to be affirming that the idea of creative intuition is peculiar to contemporary and modern poetics; and yet he reintroduces the intuitive moment in the context of classical philosophy when he states that all reasoning, deductive and syllogistic, is based in reality on an intuitive principle, on the existence, that is, of first principles that are not deduced but seen. The classical intuition of first principles, however, was still a modality of reason, the very law of its functioning; whereas the poetic intuition of the Moderns is an insight of the imagination: not a logical operation (which discovers) but the final effect of an imaginative operation (which creates).
Maritain does not appear sensitive to this difference. Indeed he maintains that there is no substantial difference between poetry and intellect, both are ascribable to the “same blood.” The madness of the Surrealists and Plato’s poetic mania, along with the profound intuition of principles (to say nothing of the mystical consciousness that ultimately constitutes the final step in any explicative process of being, as Maritain never tired of insisting), all have their common root in the spiritual makeup of mankind:
My contention, then, is that everything depends, in the issue we are discussing, on the recognition of the existence of a spiritual unconscious, or rather, preconscious, of which Plato and the ancient wise men were well aware, and the disregard of which in favor of the Freudian unconscious alone is a sign of the dullness of our times. There are two kinds of unconscious, two great domains of psychological activity screened from the grasp of consciousness: the preconscious of the spirit in its living springs, and the unconscious of blood and flesh, instincts, tendencies, complexes, repressed images and desires, traumatic memories, as constituting a closed or autonomous dynamic whole. I would like to designate the first kind of unconscious by the name of spiritual or, for the sake of Plato, musical unconscious or preconscious; and the second by the name of automatic unconscious or deaf unconscious—deaf to the intellect, and structured into a world of its own apart from the intellect; we might also say, in quite a general sense, leaving aside any particular theory, Freudian unconscious. These two kinds of unconscious life are at work at the same time; in concrete existence their respective impacts on conscious activity ordinarily interfere or intermingle in a greater or less degree.… But they are essentially distinct and thoroughly different in nature. (91–92)
It is enough to think of the ordinary and everyday functioning of intellect, in so far as intellect is really in activity, and of the way in which ideas arise in our minds, and every genuine intellectual grasping, or every new discovery, is brought about; it is enough to think of the way in which our free decisions, when they are really free, are made, especially those decisions which commit our entire life—to realize that there exists a deep nonconscious world of activity, for the intellect and the will, from which the acts and fruits of human consciousness and the clear perceptions of the mind emerge, and that the universe of concepts, logical connections, rational discursus and rational deliberation, in which the activity of the intellect takes definite form and shape, is preceded by the hidden workings of an immense and primal preconscious life. Such a life develops in night, but in a night which is translucid and fertile, and resembles that primeval diffused light which was created first, before God made, as Genesis puts it, “lights in the firmament of heaven to divide the day from the night” so as to be “for signs, and for seasons, and for days and years.” (93–94)
If we are willing to forget the desperate syncretism of Maritain’s ploy and prepared to understand this “creative intuition” in terms of modern and contemporary aesthetics, his argument appears, if not acceptable, at least consistent.
What he is saying is that the foundation of a spiritual preconscious different from the unconscious of psychology is the foundation of a primum that is both psychological and ontological, a sort of archetypal Realm of the Mothers from which objective reality and personal spiritual activity itself both draw their nourishment. In this way we can understand poetic knowledge to be an affective connaturality that puts us into contact with the secret life of being itself, and whose principal organ is none other than intuition, prelogical imaginative activity, the only activity capable of grasping a deep reality that precedes logical distinctions and the duality of thought and being.