Being in the World

A Quotable Maritain Reader

Mario D'Souza, C.S.B., Jonathan R. Seiling, Mario D'Souza, C.S.B., Jonathan R. Seiling

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780268077846
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: History & Theory of Philosophy

The work of the lay Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain (1882-1973) continues to provoke and inspire readers to engage in a Thomistic approach to many of the questions facing the world today. Maritain's wide-ranging thought touched on many fields, including aesthetics, anthropology, educational theory, moral philosophy, and ethics, as well as Thomism and its relationship to other philosophical stances.

In Being in the World: A Quotable Maritain Reader, Mario O. D'Souza, C.S.B., has selected seven hundred and fifty of the most salient quotations found in the English translations of fifty-four works by Jacques Maritain. Organized into forty thematic chapters, ordered alphabetically, the book serves as an overview of the areas that Maritain's writings addressed. By referring to entries in Being in the World, readers can quickly locate key passages in Maritain's writing on a given topic and then turn elsewhere to the full texts for more in-depth study. Complete with a detailed index of key terms, the Reader will be an essential reference tool for the study of Maritain in English.

CHAPTER ONE

ARISTOTLE

1. Aristotle is a pure philosopher: he establishes the theory of what we call ‘pure nature.’ But the state of pure nature, as a fact and in the concrete, has never existed for man, who is always found either in the state of grace—that is super-nature—or in the state of fallen nature. In so far as man is concerned, many of the problems that Aristotle left and had to leave unsolved, find their solution—just as many of the principles that he formulated find their true value—only in a higher order, of whose existence he had not the least suspicion. The true supermen are the saints: true contemplation is not that of Aristotle, for it presupposes grace and the love of God. (TS, pp. 24–25)

2. In epistemology Aristotle showed that physics, mathematics, and metaphysics, or the first philosophy, are indeed three distinct sciences, but that they are distinguished by their subject-matter, not by the faculty employed, which in all alike is reason. But his most important achievement in this sphere was to prove, by the marvellous analysis of abstraction which dominates his entire philosophy, that our ideas are not innate memories of prenatal experience, but derived from the senses by an activity of the mind. (IP, p. 64)

3. Aristotle’s mind was at once extremely practical and extremely metaphysical. A rigorous logician, but also a keen-sighted realist, he gladly respected the demands of the actual, and found room in his speculation for every variety of being without violating or distorting the facts at any point, displaying an intellectual vigour and freedom to be surpassed only by the crystalline lucidity and angelic force of St. Thomas Aquinas. But this vast wealth is arranged in the light of principles, mastered, classified, measured, and dominated by the intellect. It is the masterpiece of wisdom, a wisdom which is still wholly human, but nevertheless, from its lofty throne, embraces with a single glance the totality of things.

Aristotle, however, was a profound rather than a comprehensive thinker. He took little care to display the proportions and wide perspectives of his philosophy; his primary object was to apprehend by an absolutely reliable method and with a faultless precision what in every nature accessible to human knowledge is most characteristic, most intimate—in short, most truly itself. Therefore he not only organised human knowledge, and laid the solid foundations of logic, biology, psychology, natural history, metaphysics, ethics, and politics, but also cut and polished a host of precious definitions and conclusions sparkling with the fires of reality.

It can therefore be affirmed without hesitation that among philosophers Aristotle holds a position altogether apart: genius, gifts, and achievement—all are unique. It is the law of nature that the sublime is difficult to achieve and that what is difficult is rare. But when a task is of extraordinary difficulty both in itself and in the conditions it requires, we may expect that there will be but one workman capable of its accomplishment. Moreover, a well-built edifice is usually built not on the plans of several architects, but on the plan of a single one. If, therefore, the edifice of human wisdom or philosophy is to be adequately constructed, the foundations must be laid once for all by a single thinker. On these foundations thousands of builders will be able to build in turn, for the growth of knowledge represents the labour of generations and will never be complete. But there can be but one master-builder. (IP, pp. 66–67)

4. Aristotle could philosophize without ordering metaphysics to a higher science (though he really had the idea of a higher contemplation, which he placed at the peak of metaphysics, and where man participates in the life of the gods), he could do so because in the first place he was living under the régime of the Gentiles, outside of the Mosaic revelation, before the Christian revelation; and because he found himself in absolutely unique conditions, exactly at the culminating point of Greek civilization and intellectuality, and because he profited by that Grecian success which could never again be found with the help of nature alone. Descartes could not philosophize in that way because he was living under the régime of the Gospel, and because Christian riches are heavy, much heavier to carry than the light crowns of pagans. By a merciless and blessed necessity, which springs from the depths of our natural weakness and of the demands of divine love, the Christian cannot neglect the comfortings from above and the order they demand, without collapsing everywhere. (DD, pp. 87–88)

5. Aristotelian ethics is par excellence the natural (purely natural) ethics and the philosophical (purely philosophical) ethics. And in what concerns the real direction of human conduct it runs aground in inefficacy. (MP, p. 51)

6. The great truth which the Greeks discovered (and which their philosophers conceptualized in very divers spiritual ways) is the superiority of contemplation, as such, to action. As Aristotle puts it, life according to the intellect is better than a merely human life.

But the error follows. What did that assertion mean to them practically? It meant that mankind lives for the sake of a few intellectuals. There is a category of specialists—the philosophers—who lead a superhuman life; then in a lower category, destined to serve them, come those who lead the ordinary human life, the civil or political one; they in turn are served by those who lead a sub-human life, the life of work—that is, the slaves. The high truth of the superiority of contemplative life was bound up with the contempt of work and the plague of slavery. (SP, p. 137)

CHAPTER TWO

ART AND THE ARTIST

1. Through the habitus or virtue of art superelevating his mind from within, the artist is a ruler who uses rules according to his ends; it is as senseless to conceive of him as the slave of the rules as to consider the worker the slave of his tools. Properly speaking, he possesses them and is not possessed by them: he is not held by them, it is he who holds—through them—matter and the real; and sometimes, in those superior moments where the working of genius resembles in art the miracles of God in nature, he will act, not against the rules, but outside of and above them, in conformity with a higher rule and a more hidden order. (AS, p. 39)

2. Morality has nothing to say when it comes to the good of the work, or to Beauty. Art has nothing to say when it comes to the good of human life. Yet human life is in need of that very Beauty and intellectual creativity, where art has the last word; and art exercises itself in the midst of that very human life, those human needs and human ends, where morality has the last word. In other words it is true that Art and Morality are two autonomous worlds, each sovereign in its own sphere, but they cannot ignore or disregard one another, for man belongs in these two worlds, both as intellectual maker and as moral agent, doer of actions which engage his own destiny. And because an artist is a man before being an artist, the autonomous world of morality is simply superior to (and more inclusive than) the autonomous world of art. There is no law against the law on which the destiny of man depends. In other words Art is indirectly and extrinsically subordinate to morality. (RA, p. 41)

3. Because it exists in man and because its good is not the good of man, art is subject in its exercise to an extrinsic control, imposed in the name of a higher end which is the very beatitude of the living being in whom it resides. (AS, p. 71)

4. The motto Art for Art’s sake simply disregards the world of morality, and the values and rights of human life. Art for Art’s sake does not mean art for the work, which is the right formula. It means an absurdity, that is, a supposed necessity for the artist to be only an artist, not a man, and for art to cut itself off from its own supplies, and from all the food, fuel and energy it receives from human life. (RA, p. 48)

5. Art, as such, does not consist in imitating, but in making, in composing or constructing, in accordance with the laws of the very object to be posited in being (ship, house, carpet, colored canvas or hewn block). This exigency of its generic concept takes precedence over everything else; and to make the representation of the real its essential end is to destroy it. (AS, p. 53)

6. The imitative arts aim neither at copying the appearances of nature, nor at depicting the “ideal,” but at making an object beautiful by manifesting a form with the help of sensible signs. (AS, p. 59)

7. Art, then, remains fundamentally inventive and creative. It is the faculty of producing, not of course ex nihilo, but from a pre-existing matter, a new creature, an original being, capable of stirring in turn a human soul. This new creature is the fruit of a spiritual marriage which joins the activity of the artist to the passivity of a given matter.

Hence in the artist the feeling of his peculiar dignity. He is as it were an associate of God in the making of beautiful works; by developing the powers placed in him by the Creator—for “every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights”—and by making use of created matter, he creates, so to speak, at second remove. . . .

Artistic creation does not copy God’s creation, it continues it. And just as the trace and the image of God appear in His creatures, so the human stamp is imprinted on the work of art—the full stamp, sensitive and spiritual, not only that of the hands, but of the whole soul. Before the work of art passes from art into the matter, by a transitive action, the very conception of the art has had to emerge from within the soul, by an immanent and vital action, like the emergence of the mental word. (AS, p. 60)

8. Art is not an abstract entity without flesh and bones, a separate Platonic Idea supposedly come down on earth and acting among us as the Angel of Making or a metaphysical Dragon let loose; Art is a virtue of the practical intellect, and the intellect itself does not stand alone, but is a power of Man. When the intellect thinks, it is not the intellect which thinks: it is man, a particular man, who thinks through his intellect. When Art operates, it is man, a particular man, who operates through his Art. . . .

It is nonsense to believe that the genuineness or the purity of a work of art depends upon a rupture with, a moving away from the living forces which animate and move the human being—it is nonsense to believe that this purity of the work depends on a wall of separation built up between art and desire or love. The purity of the work depends upon the strength of the inner dynamism which generates the work, that is, the strength of the virtue of art.

No wall of separation isolates the virtue of art from the inner universe of man’s desire and love. (RA, pp. 49–50)

9. Art as such, for instance, transcends, like the spirit, every frontier of space or time, every historical or national boundary. Like science and philosophy, it is universal of itself.

But art does not reside in an angelic mind: it resides in a soul which animates a living body, and which, by the natural necessity in which it finds itself of learning, and progressing little by little and with the assistance of others, makes the rational animal a naturally social animal. Art is therefore basically dependent upon everything which the human community, spiritual tradition and history transmit to the body and mind of man. By its human subject and its human roots, art belongs to a time and a country. (RA, p. 58)

10. Art, like knowledge, is appendent to values which are independent of the interests, even the noblest interests, of human life, for they are values of the intellectual order. Poets do not come on the stage after dinner, to afford ladies and gentlemen previously satiated with terrestrial food the intoxication of pleasures which are of no consequence. But neither are they waiters who provide them with the bread of existentialist nausea, Marxist dialectics or traditional morality, the beef of political realism or idealism and the ice-cream of philanthropy. They provide mankind with a spiritual food, which is intuitive experience, revelation and beauty: for man, as I said in my youth, is an animal who lives on transcendentals. (RA, p. 73)

11. One of the vicious trends which outrage our modern industrial civilization is a kind of asceticism at the service of the useful, a kind of unholy mortification for the sake of no superior life. Men are still capable of excitation and relaxation, but almost deprived of any pleasure and rest of the soul—a life which would seem insane even to the great materialists of antiquity. They flog themselves, they renounce the sweetness of the world and all the ornaments of the terrestrial abode, omnem ornatum saeculi, with the single incentive of working, working, working, and acquiring technological empire over matter. Their daily life lacks nothing so much as the delectations of the intelligence-permeated sense; and even the churches in which they pray are not uncommonly masterworks in ugliness. Then, since we cannot live without delectation, they have no other resource left but those arts and pleasures which satisfy “the brute curiosity of an animal’s stare”—all the better as they produce stupefaction and obliviousness, as a substitute for Epicurean ataraxy. No wonder that other kinds of drugs, from alcohol or marijuana to the cult of carnal Venus, occupy a growing place in the process of compensation.

This dehumanizing process can be overcome. Art in this connection has an outstanding mission. It is the most natural power of healing and agent of spiritualization needed by the human community. (CI, pp. 190–91)

12. The highest moral virtues can never make up for the lack or mediocrity of the virtue of art. But it is clear that laziness, cowardice or self-complacency, which are moral vices, are a bad soil for the exercise of artistic activity. The moral constitution of the human subject has some kind of indirect impact on his art. (RA, p. 92)

13. In contradistinction to Prudence, which is also a perfection of the Practical Intellect, Art is concerned with the good of the work, not with the good of man. The Ancients took pleasure in laying stress on this difference, in their thorough-going comparison between Art and Prudence. If a craftsman contrives a good piece of woodwork or jewelry, the fact of his being spiteful or debauched is immaterial, just as it is immaterial for a geometer to be a jealous or wicked man, if his demonstrations provide us with geometrical truth. As Thomas Aquinas put it, Art, in this respect, resembles the virtues of the Speculative Intellect: it causes man to act in a right way, not with regard to the use of man’s own free will, and to the rightness of the human will, but with regard to the rightness of a particular operating power. The good that Art pursues is not the good of the human will, but the good of the very artifact. Thus, art does not require, as a necessary precondition, that the will or appetite should be straight and undeviating with respect to its own nature and its own—human or moral—ends and dynamism, or in the line of human destiny. Oscar Wilde was but a good Thomist when he wrote: “The fact of a man being a poisoner is nothing against his prose.” (RA, pp. 23–24)

14. For an artist to spoil his work and sin against his art is forbidden by his artistic con...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter One. Aristotle
• Chapter Two. Art and the Artist
• Chapter Three. Being
• Chapter Four. The Christian Life
• Chapter Five. Christian Philosophy
• Chapter Six. The Church
• Chapter Seven. Culture and Civilization
• Chapter Eight. Democracy and Democratic Society
• Chapter Nine. Descartes and Cartesian Philosophy
• Chapter Ten. Philosophy of Education
• Chapter Eleven. Evil
• Chapter Twelve. Ethics
• Chapter Thirteen. Faith
• Chapter Fourteen. Freedom
• Chapter Fifteen. God
• Chapter Sixteen. History
• Chapter Seventeen. Humanism
• Chapter Eighteen. Intellect and Intelligence
• Chapter Nineteen. Knowing and Knowledge
• Chapter Twenty. Man
• Chapter Twenty-one. Marx and Marxism
• Chapter Twenty-two. Metaphysics and Metaphysicians
• Chapter Twenty-three. Moral Philosophy
• Chapter Twenty-four. Mystery and Mysticism
• Chapter Twenty-five. Natural Law and Human Rights
• Chapter Twenty-six. The Person
• Chapter Twenty-seven. The Person and the Individual
• Chapter Twenty-eight. Personality
• Chapter Twenty-nine. Philosophers
• Chapter Thirty. Philosophy
• Chapter Thirty-one. Poetry and the Poet
• Chapter Thirty-two. Politics, Society, and the State
• Chapter Thirty-three. Prayer and Contemplation
• Chapter Thirty-four. Reason and Reasoning
• Chapter Thirty-five. Science
• Chapter Thirty-six. Theology and the Theologian
• Chapter Thirty-seven. St. Thomas and Thomism
• Chapter Thirty-eight. Truth
• Chapter Thirty-nine. Varia
• Chapter Forty. Wisdom
• Bibliography of Maritain Sources