What Man Has Made Of Man by Adler Mortimer J

Author:Adler,Mortimer J.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: PHILOSOPHY. PSYCHOLOGY, Philosophy of mind
Publisher: Green And Company.
Published: 1937-10-24T05:00:00+00:00

The critical point can be expressed in another way in terms of the distinction between secundum se and quoad nos. The thing as known is quoad nos. But knowledge is a proportion between intellect and thing, and the thing which measures the adequacy of the intellect in knowing is the thing secundum se. If the instrumentality of the idea as the medium of knowledge is ignored, no difference is possible between the thing as it is, secundum se, and the thing as it is known, quoad nos: and it is impossible to distinguish truth and falsity. If, on the other hand, the meaning of quoad nos is not qualified by the intentional reference of knowledge to its object, there is again no distinction between the thing as it is and as it is known, and we are imprisoned in the world of our ideas. Radical objectivism and complete subjectivism seem to be opposite errors but they are the same essentially and arise from the same failure to see that ideas as the instrumentality of knowledge relate its subject and object by intentional reference and separate them according to the mode of being of the thing, secundum se and quoad nos.

This is related to the problem of the way in which men have ideas. In the history of thought, there have been only three solutions: (i) ideas are intellectually intuited, as sensible things are sensed; (2) ideas are innate principles of the understanding itself; and (3) ideas are in the intellect only as a result of abstraction from sense-experience. The first and second of these positions are combined in the Platonic tradition which, through St. Augustine, influenced Descartes and Male-branche and, through Malebranche, Berkeley and Hume. (Cf. E. Gil-son, The Spirit of Modern Philosophy, New York, 1937: pp. 15 ff.; 86 ff.) It is through the illumination of the innate ideas, the seminal reasons, by the light of ideal objects, that intellectual intuition takes place. Through light we see light. The distinction of Kant is that he denied the first position and embraced the second; in fact, he opposed the first so vigorously that he also denied the reflexive power of the understanding to know its own ideas in second intention. In the Platonic tradition ideas exist per se because they are the objects as well as the content of knowledge. According to Kant, purely intelligible objects, if there are any, transcend our knowledge because the ideas, the pure concepts of the understanding, serve only as the forms of judgment, the matter of which must be provided by sensuous intuition. In contrast, the third position, taken by Aristotle and St. Thomas, denies that ideas exist per se; agrees with Kant in the sense that such intelli-

NOTES (from p. 44)

gible objects as separate souls, the angels and God, are not capable of being known intellectually by abstraction but only negatively and analogically by construction; but makes the intellectual knowledge of sensible things,—the apprehension of their intelligible being,—as genuine as the sensitive knowledge of their accidents and operations.

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