Maritain and Aquinas on Our Discovery of Being

io totalis or of what one may call “extensive abstraction.” Also, while in this book he does not spell out in detail the steps involved in the intellect’s discovery of either the common sense notion of being or the metaphysical notion of being, he does refer to both as gained by intuition. There, in response to Gabriel Marcel’s rejection of an intuition of being, Maritain refers to “the obscure intuition of being possessed by common sense, the perception of which I have termed vague being. It is only when the metaphysical intuition of being has occurred that this assurance refers to it also” (id., 60, end of the long note 1 beginning on id., 59). 34 EE English, 27, n. 13; EE French, 35–36, n. 13. Maritain and Aquinas on Our Discovery of Being 427 ject of thought by formulating a concept or notion of existence (existentia ut significata). Here I pause to compare this account with that of Aquinas as best as one can reconstruct his own position on the basis of his rather scattered references. I would first note that, at least on my reading of Thomas, both he and Maritain distinguish between a pre-metaphysical or prephilosophical notion of being and the metaphysical notion of being as being. As regards Maritain’s three steps: 1. Both Thomas and Maritain argue that all of our knowledge begins in some way from sense experience. Maritain has referred in passing to the role played by the aestimative/cogitative power in our moving on to judgments of existence. Without rejecting some possible role for the cogitative power, here I would emphasize the role of the first internal sense power, the sensus communis. For Aquinas this internal sense has two functions: (a) it distinguishes objects reported by different external senses appropriately such as this sound, as different from this color, this odor, etc.; (b) it enables a higher animal or a human being to be aware when such an agent is actually perceiving something with one or more external sense. 2. Both Thomas and Maritain distinguish between the intellect’s first operation which apprehends the essences or natures of things, and its second operation—judgment—which looks to a thing’s esse; and I also think that Maritain’s reference to this as a simultaneous awakening of both of these operations is a defensible presentation of Thomas’s position. 3. While Maritain recognizes with Aquinas that the intellect knows the subject as individual by reflecting back on the phantasms preserved at 35 Id. Note that Maritain lists as step 4 the thinking subject’s discovery of first principles and only as step 5 the subject’s explicit awareness or consciousness of its own existence. I pass over additional consideration of these steps here in the interests of space, but would call the reader’s attention to Therese Scarpelli Cory’s recently published very thorough and helpful examination of Aquinas’s own understanding of self-awareness: Aquinas on Human SelfKnowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 36 See Sententia libri De anima, II.24, ed. Leonine, 45.1, c. 13, 120, lines 99–105 (note especially: “sensu enim communi percipimus nos videre et discernimus inter album et dulce”); c. 26, 178, lines 8–14: “huiusmodi actiones sunt duae: una est secundum quod nos percipimus actiones sensuum propriorum, puta quod sentimus nos videre et audire; alia est secundum quod discernimus inter sensibilia diversorum sensuum, puta quod aliud sit dulce et aliud album.” Also see. c. 27 where Thomas finds Aristotle beginning to investigate the common sense by basing himself on the fact that we perceive that we see and hear (“ex hac operatione qua sentimus nos videre et audire” [182:1–5]) and then throughout this chapter by appealing to the fact that the common sense distinguishes sensible objects from one another in order to show that there is one common sense.