This is not an unheard-of philosophical position, and we cannot deny Maritain the right to espouse it. But Maritain insists on making Thomas’s doctrine of the intellect the foundation of this conception.
Over and above the conscious rational arguments by means of which reason makes itself manifest, he tells us, there exist the very springs of creativity and love “hidden in the primordial translucid night of the intimate vitality of the soul” (94). Now, he continues: “the Schoolmen were not interested in working out any theory about the unconscious life of the soul” (and we are grateful to him for this admission) “yet their doctrines implied its existence” (96).
To declare that in a given philosophical system a certain problematic issue is not openly mooted, but that its constituent elements, and to some extent its solution, emerge from the system’s very framework, is a legitimate position. A system is there to be interpreted, not only by contemporaries but also by posterity, and, since it claims to state truths about the world, it must be ready for any further developments in our knowledge of the world that might follow in its wake. But were the premises of this doctrine contained in Scholastic thought?
Maritain takes into consideration the Aristotelian notion of the agent intellect as inherited and elaborated upon by Thomas. The agent intellect engages in a process of intellectual abstraction performed on the contents of a possible intellect, which in and of itself would not be capable of a similar process of abstraction (given that it receives passively only what is presented to it by the senses). Maritain clearly embraces Thomas’s solution, which is opposed to Arabic attempts to locate the agent intellect somewhere outside of the individual soul.
But, in the Thomistic doctrine of the agent intellect, there is no suggestion of any sort of unconscious activity. We could at best speak of a lightning-fast operation, instinctive perhaps, but of which we are fully conscious at the moment we avail ourselves of it, at the moment, that is, when we recognize the universal form in the individual experience.
In fact, in the following comment the problem of the unconscious does not seem to arise (we might also say that Maritain is honest enough, in paraphrasing Thomas’s position, not to falsify its terms):
Thus, at a first step, the intelligible content present in the images, and which, in the images, was only intelligible in potency (or capable of being made capable of becoming an object of intellectual vision), is made intelligible in act in a spiritual form (specie impressa, impressed pattern), let us say, in an intelligible germ, which is received from the images by the intellect, under the activation of the Illuminating Intellect. But this is not yet enough for the attaining of knowledge. It is necessary that the intelligible content drawn from the images should be not only intelligible in act, or capable of becoming an object of intellectual vision, but intellected in act, or actually become an object of intellectual vision. Then it is the intellect itself, which, having been impregnated by the impressed pattern or intelligible germ, vitally produces—always under the activation of the Illuminating Intellect—an inner fruit, a final and more fully determined spiritual form (species expressa), the concept, in which the content drawn from the images is brought to the very same state of spirituality-in-act in which the intellect-in-act is, and in which this now perfectly spiritualized content is seen, is actually an object of intellectual vision. (97–98)
Here, Maritain’s seductive language is already beginning to color, with a kind of “imaginative efficacy,” what is, in Thomas’s version, one of the simplest procedures of the human intellect.
From all of the various texts in which Thomas expounds his doctrine of the intellect,16 we may derive the following cognitive moments:
(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