h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Somehow I managed to delete the original entry from my PS when cleaning up my PS a bit earlier. Apologies if therefore you are seeing this again!

Jacques Maritain (1882 – 1973) was a French philosopher responsible for reviving St. Thomas Aquinas for modern times. For more on Jacques Maritain, see here: http://www.nd.edu/~maritain/

Maritain's philosophy is based on the view that metaphysics is prior to epistemology. Being is first apprehended implicitly in sense experience, and is known in two ways.

1/ Being is known reflexively by abstraction from sense experience. One experiences a particular being, e.g. a cup, a dog, etc. and through reflexion ("bending back") on the judgement, e.g. "this is a dog", one recognizes that the object in question is an existent.

2/ In light of attaining being reflexively through apprehension of sense experience one may arrive at what Maritain calls "an Intuition of Being".

For Maritian this is point of departure for metaphysics, without the intuition of being one cannot be a metaphysician at all. The intuition of being involves rising to the apprehension of ‘ens secundum quod est ens’ (being insofar as it is a being).


Some Quotes:

In this American concept of success there is no greediness or egoism. It is, it seems to me, rather an over-simplified idea that "to succeed" is to bear fruit, and therefore to give proof of the fact that psychologically and morally you are not a failure.

This is a very old illusion, already denounced by Socrates: mistaking external success, which depends on a great many ingredients extraneous to the ethical life -- good connections, cleverness, good luck, ruthlessness, and so forth -- for genuine "success" in the metaphysical sense, that is, for the genuinely human happy issue which is internal, and consists in having, as Socrates said, a "good and beautiful soul."

-- Reflections on America, 1958


Modern civilization is a worn-out garment. One cannot sew new pieces on it. It requires a total and, I may say, substantial recasting, a transvaluation of cultural principles. What is needed is a vital primacy:

* of quality over quantity,
* of work over money,
* of the human over the technological,
* of wisdom over science,
* of the common service of human persons over the individual covetousness of unlimited enrichment, and
* of the common service of human persons over the State's covetousness of unlimited power.

-- Integral Humanism, 1947.


The men of today have the very instructive privilege of watching the historic failure of three centuries of rationalism. It would be suicidal to blame reason. But they can observe everywhere, even in the economic order, what is produced by the claim of imposing upon matter the rule of a reason which itself refuses to be guided by the highest and most essential realities, and will be satisfied only with facile clarities. All rationalization inevitably engenders absurd results when it is not the work of an integral reason, which heeds the order of wisdom and of nature.

-- The Dream of Descartes, 1944.


If we remember that the animal is a specialist, and a perfect one, all of its knowing-power being fixed upon a single task to be done, we ought to conclude that an education program which would only aim at forming specialists ever more perfect in ever more specialized fields, and unable to pass judgment on any matter that goes beyond their specialized competence, would lead indeed to a progressive animalization of the human mind and life.

-- Education at the Crossroads, 1943.


If we wish to picture to ourselves the universal order of reality in degrees or grades as St. Thomas saw it, we shall have to put at the base of our diagram the world of sensible things, things subject to time and movement: the world of sensible nature.

-- Freedom in the Modern World, 1933

A little bigraphical detail to flesh out the man ...

Jacques Maritain (1882-1973), French philosopher and political thinker, was one of the principal exponents of Thomism in the twentieth century and an influential interpreter of the thought of St Thomas Aquinas.

He was born into a French Protestant family. A year later, Raïssa Oumansouff was born into a Jewish family in Russia. The two met in Paris as university students at the Sorbonne, they where both were chiefly interested in science and philosophy. Raïssa and Jacques married in 1904. Soon, they became disenchanted with scientism (popular at that time at the Sorbonne), for it could not, for him, address the larger existential issues of life. The lectures of Henri Bergson, but more importantly the influence of Léon Bloy, helped them find the answers they sought. They were converted to Roman Catholicism, entering the Church with Raïssa's sister Vera, in 1906.

Maritain taught at the Collège Stanislas France, and later at the Institut Catholique de Paris. And the Petit Séminaire de Versailles. In 1933, he gave his first lectures in North America in Toronto at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies. He also taught at Columbia University; at the Committee on Social Thought, University of Chicago; at the University of Notre Dame, and at Princeton University

Maritain's political theory was extremely influential, and was a primary source behind the Christian Democratic movement. His is most enduring legacy is probably his moral and political philosophy, and the influence of his work on human rights can be seen, not only in the United Nations Declaration of 1948 but in a number of national declarations, such as the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the preamble to the Constitution of the Fourth French Republic (1946).