IV. Moral Experience
Finally moral experience offers to us the most widespread
instance of knowledge through connaturality. As we have noticed, it is the
experiential—not philosophical—knowledge of moral virtues that Thomas Aquinas
saw the first and main example of knowledge through connaturality that moral consciousness
attains a kind of knowing—inexpressible in words and notions—of the deepest
dispositions—longings, fears, hopes or despairs, primeval loves and options—involved
in the night of the subjectivity. When a man makes a free decision, he takes
into account, not only that he possesses of moral science and factual information,
and which is manifested to him in concepts and notions, but also all the secret
elements of evaluation which depend on what he is, and which are known to him
through inclination, through his own actual propensities. And his own virtues,
if he has any.
But the point on which I should like to lay stress deals
with that most controversial tenet in moral philosophy, Natural Law. I don’t intend
to discuss Natural Law now, I shall only emphasize an absolutely essential
element, to my mind, in the concept of Natural Law. The genuine concept of
Natural Law is the concept of a law which is natural not only insofar as it
expresses the normality of functioning of human nature, but also insofar as it
is naturally known, that is, known
through inclination or connaturality, not through conceptual knowledge.
You will allow me to place myself in the perspective of a
philosophy of Natural Law: I do not do so in order to assume that you take such
a philosophy for granted, but in order to clarify the very idea of Natural Law.
My contention is that the judgments in which Natural Law is made manifest to
practical Reason do not proceed from any conceptual, discursive, rational
exercise of reason; they proceed from that connaturality
or congeniality through which what is
consonant with the essential inclinations of human nature is grasped by the
intellect as good; what is dissonant, as bad.
Be it immediately added, to avoid any misunderstanding,
first, that the inclinations in question, even if they deal with animal
instincts, are essentially human, and therefore, reason-permeated inclinations;
they are inclinations refracted through the crystal of reason in its
unconscious or preconscious life. Second, that, man being an historical animal,
these essential inclinations of human nature either developed or were released
in the course of time: as a result, man’s knowledge of Natural Law
progressively developed, and continues to develop. And the very history of
moral conscience has divided the truly essential inclinations of human nature
from the accidental, warped or perverted ones. I would say that these genuinely
essential inclinations, have been responsible for the regulations which,
recognized in the form of dynamic schemes from the time of the oldest social
communities, have remained permanent in the human race, while taking forms more
definite and more clearly determined.
But let us close this parenthesis. What are the consequences
of the basic fact of Natural Law being known through inclination or
connaturality, not through rational knowledge?
First: not only the prescriptions of positive law,
established by human reason, but even those requirements of the normality of functioning
of human nature which are known to men through a spontaneous or a philosophical
exercise of conceptual and rational knowledge are not part of Natural Law. Natural
Law, dealing only with regulations known through inclination, deals only with
principles immediately known (that is
known through inclination, without any conceptual or rational medium) of human
morality.
Second: being known through inclination, the precepts of Natural
Law are known in an undemonstrable
manner. Thus it is that men (except when they make use of the reflective and
critical disciplines of philosophy) are unable to give account of and
rationally to justify their most fundamental moral beliefs: and this very fact
is a token, not of the irrationality and intrinsic invalidity of these beliefs,
but on the contrary, of their essential naturality,
and therefore of their greater
validity, and of their more than human
rationality.
Third: this is so because no conceptual and rational
exercise of human reason intervenes in its knowledge of Natural Law, so that
human reason knows Natural Law, but has no part, either in causing it to exist, or even in causing it to be known. As a result, uncreated
Reason, the Reason of the Principle of Nature, is the only reason at play not only
in establishing Natural Law (by the
very fact that it creates human nature), but in making Natural Law known,
through the inclinations of this very nature, to which human reason listens
when it knows Natural Law. And it is because Natural Law depends only on Divine
Reason that it is possessed of a character naturally sacred, and binds man in
conscience, and is the prime foundation of human law, which is a free and
contingent determination of what Natural Law leaves undetermined, and which
obliges by virtue of Natural Law.
Philosophers and philosophical theories supervene in order
to explain and justify, through concepts and reasoning, what, from the time of
the cave-man, men have progressively known through inclination and
connaturality. Moral philosophy is reflective
knowledge, a sort of after-knowledge. It does not discover moral law. The moral
law was discovered by men before the existence of any moral philosophy. Moral
philosophy has critically to analyze and rationally elucidate moral standards
and rules of conduct whose validity was previously discovered in an
undemonstrable manner; it has also to clear them, as far as possible, from the
adventitious outgrowths or deviations which may have developed by reason of the
coarseness of our nature and the accidents of social evolution.
Eighteenth-century rationalism assumed that Natural Law was either discovered
in Nature or a priori deduced by conceptual and rational knowledge,
and from there imposed upon human life by philosophers and by legislators in
the manner of a code of geometrical propositions. No wonder that finally “eight
or more new systems of natural law made their appearance at every Leipzig
booksellers’ fair” at the end of the eighteenth Century, and that Jean-Paul
Richter might observe that “every fair and every war brings forth a new natural
law.” I submit that all the theories of Natural Law which have been offered
since Grotius (and including Grotius himself) were spoiled by the disregard of
the fact that Natural Law is known though inclination or connaturality, not
through conceptual and rational knowledge.
~Jacques Maritain: Natural Law: Reflectionson Theory and Practice, Chap. 1, “On Knowledge through Connaturality,” section iv; pp. 19-23. (St. Augustine’s Press; 1 edition, April 6, 2001).
Chapter 1 topics:
I. Saint Thomas and the Notion of Knowledge through Connaturality
II. Mystical Experience
III. Poetic Knowledge
IV. Moral Experience
V. Metaphysics and Knowledge through Connaturality
~Jacques Maritain: Natural Law: Reflectionson Theory and Practice, Chap. 1, “On Knowledge through Connaturality,” section iv; pp. 19-23. (St. Augustine’s Press; 1 edition, April 6, 2001).
Chapter 1 topics:
I. Saint Thomas and the Notion of Knowledge through Connaturality
II. Mystical Experience
III. Poetic Knowledge
IV. Moral Experience
V. Metaphysics and Knowledge through Connaturality
Jacques Maritain
