Maritain: Natural Law known through inclination or connaturality

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

Maritain: Natural law, the gnoseological element

NATURAL LAW is not a law written by men. Men know it with greater or less difficulty, and in different degrees, running the risk of error here as elsewhere. The only practical knowledge all men have naturally and infallibly in common, as a self-evident principle intellectually perceived by virtue of the concepts involved, is that we must do good and avoid evil. This is the preamble and the principle of natural law; it is not the law itself. Natural law is the ensemble of things to do and not to do which follow therefrom in a necessary fashion. That every sort of error and deviation is possible in the determination of these things merely proves that our sight is weak, our nature course, and that innumerable accidents can corrupt our judgment. Montaigne remarked that, among certain peoples, incest and thievery were considered virtuous acts. Pascal was scandalized by this. All this proves nothing against the natural law, any more than a mistake in addition proves anything against arithmetic [or, the mistakes of certain primitive peoples, for whom the stars were holes in the tent which covered the world, prove anything against astronomy].

By the very fact that the Natural law is an unwritten law, man’s knowledge of it has increased little by little as man’s moral conscience has developed. The latter was at first in a twilight state. Anthropologists have taught us within what structures of tribal life and in the midst of what magic this knowledge of the natural law was awakened, and how it was primitively formed. This shows simply that the knowledge men have had of the unwritten law has passed through more diverse forms and stages than certain philosophers or theologians have believed. At the same time, we become aware of the fact that the knowledge which our own moral conscience has of this law is doubtless still imperfect, and very likely it will continue to develop and to become more refined as long as humanity exists. Only when the Gospel has penetrated to the very depth of human substance will natural law appear in its flower and its perfection.

[So the law and the knowledge of the law are two different things.] Yet the law has force of law only when it is promulgated. It is only insofar as it is known and expressed in assertions of practical reason that the natural law has force of law. The gnoseological element is therefore fundamental in natural law.

It is important to recognize that human reason does not discover the regulations of natural law in an abstract and theoretical manner, as a series of geometrical theorems. Moreover, it does not discover them through the conceptual exercise of the intellect, or by way of rational knowledge. I think the teaching of St Thomas here should be understood in a much deeper and more precise fashion than is usual. When he says that human reason discovers the regulations of natural law through the guidance of the inclinations of human nature, he means that the very mode or manner in which human reason knows natural law is not rational knowledge, but knowledge through inclination.

Saint Thomas largely developed this notion of knowledge by inclination, but elsewhere—in the Summa theologiae, II-II, 45, 2. Knowledge by inclination or by connaturality is a kind of knowledge that is not clear, like that obtained through concepts and conceptual judgments. It is obscure, unsystematic, vital knowledge, by means of instinct or sympathy, and in which the intellect, in order to make its judgments, consults the inner leanings of the subject—and listens to the melody produced by the vibration of deep-seated tendencies made present in the subject. All this leads to a judgment—not to a judgment based on concepts, but to a judgment which expresses simply the conformity of reason to tendencies to which it is inclined. […]

~Jacques Maritain: from Natural Law: Reflections On Theory & Practice.

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