The Loving Contemplation
Et voici que l’amour nous confond à l’objet même de ces mots, Et mots pour nous ils ne sont plus, n’étant plus signes ni parures, Mais la chose même qu’ils figurent et la chose même qu’ils paraient.
(Saint-John Perse, Amers, Mer de Baal, 4)
1. Loving Contemplation
The most remote intellectual inspiration from my work on Aristotle comes perhaps from my reaction to some readings, including Shelley’s Defense of Poetry, Bergson’s Introduction à la Métaphysique, Bachelard’s Nouvel Esprit Scientifique, and Aesthetics come Scienza dell’Espressione and Linguistica Generale by Benedetto Croce. These authors, as different as they may be, had in common a belief in an insurmountable dualism that would split human intelligence into opposite and watertight functions.
By personal inclination I belong to the race of those who seek unity and conciliation in everything. I consider Aristotle, Sto. Tomas, Leibniz, and Schelling are the most prominent representatives of this race in Western culture. In the East, Shânkara and Ibn ‘Arabi.
It is true that human existence on earth is struggle, division, precariousness, want, incompleteness. But to make mutilation an absolute metaphysical principle, or even an unchanging structural feature of human essence, has always struck me as an abuse, a universalizing projection of contingent experiences, or at least to make the average human state the ultimate ruler of conceivable perfection. It is cowardice, it is depression that causes a man to blame the universal, basing his defeat on a metaphysical principle that is only the paranoid enlargement of his own inner division. Anyone who gives in to this temptation soon becomes unable to conceive of the very idea of universality, which inseparably marries unity and infinity. The universal is by definition above all blame because it is above all divisions.
On the other hand, the effort to justify the universal has often taken on the meaning of rationalism, seeking to demonstrate the rationality of the real taken as a whole. Now rationality, if well understood, is nothing other than proportionality and harmony (ratio = proportio); and a whole can be said to be harmonic and proportional only in one of two ways: either in relation to another whole, or in the conformation of its constituent parts. The universal fell out of the possibility of being grasped by one or other of these categories, inasmuch as, on the one hand, it was unique and without a second, and, on the other hand, its unity transcended that of a mere relationship between parts. Thus, to attribute to the universal both rationality and irrationality seemed to me as great an abuse as to deny the universal by an irrecoverable dualism.
From a very early age, therefore, the conviction developed in me that the unity of the universal is metaphysically necessary and that, on the other hand, it does not fit into our current concepts of reason and unreason
The continuous meditation of the problem soon took on me: the universal, which imposes itself as evidence, cannot, however, be conceptualized. Kant’s formula was thus inverted, according to which metaphysical realities can only be thought of but not known: the universal can be known but cannot be thought. (For this and other reasons, Kant always seemed to me just a bumbling genius.)
Those to whom this conclusion seems unorthodox and paradoxical forget that being able to be known without being thoughtful is the most obvious and primary characteristic of all real things, starting with ourselves. I know myself by direct evidence that makes me the author of my actions, the subject of my inner states, the object of others’ actions, and so on. Whenever I apprehend myself intuitively, I apprehend myself as unity. Even in order to feel divided I have to apprehend myself as unity, otherwise I would identify with one side and forget the other, not feeling the division (as is the case with multiple personalities). I therefore know myself as a unit. However, every attempt to think of myself as such, to produce a concept, a notion, or a symbol that embraces me and presents myself as a unit, fails quite successfully: I produce aspects, profiles, signs, and that is all. At best, I create a symbol that, without actually embracing me, intentionally indicates my unity (such as the succession of episodes in a narrative intentionally indicates the unity of a character without actually realizing it). I know myself as a whole, I think of me in parts.
But in this distinction ‘thinking’ means not only discursive reasoning, but all other cognitive functions: imagination, memory, feeling. None of them can embrace that whole that I nevertheless know perfectly well and that is myself
In the same way, I know perfectly well my mother, the woman I love, the children I have begotten, my friends. I know them and immediately recognize them as irreplaceable wholes whenever they present themselves. The passage of time, changes in appearance, hair loss, weight loss, disease, old age do not affect this recognition: each of these beings is always the same and will never be another. However, if I try to think of them as concepts, imagine them, remember them or feel them, I have but a sign or symbol before me, a slice or fragment that can only mean the whole insofar as beforehand I know this whole and therefore have the ability to recognize it by a hint. Each human being can be known as a whole, but can only be thought (imagined, remembered, felt) by successive parts, the sum of which never completes it
The universal in this sense is no more no less mysterious than the singular substance we call the “human person” : knowable as a whole, unthinkable except in parts and signs
Now to think (or to imagine, or to remember, or to feel) is to produce in us, voluntarily or involuntarily, a sign, a “figure” to represent something that it indicates and that transcends it. Thinking (always in the broad sense of the term) is necessarily precarious and implies a superior cognitive faculty, capable of recognizing the whole object which it indicates in parts. What is the nature of this superior faculty?
The object that cannot be thought, that transcends subjective representation and never runs out of it, is something that is radically not dependent on us, not at our mercy, not our invention, and can therefore only be accepted, received.
To accept it, to receive it, is to respect its integrity, to project nothing on it, to add nothing nor to take it away. It implies, therefore, nothing less than this: wishing it to be what it is, not wishing it to be anything else. This full respectful acceptance, however, cannot only be passive, otherwise it will dampen our interest in the object and thus make it disappear from our circle of consciousness. On the contrary, it has to be a willing acceptance: it is an active desire that the object be what it is, remain what it is, exist on its own, and persist in existing. It is therefore not only of respect (of re spicere = look and look again). It is fully loving contemplation.
The object offers itself to me as a whole at the moment and to the extent that I accept it as an object of loving contemplation and, expelling from me every attempt to think it, to embrace it conceptually, imaginatively or sentimentally, I leave and want it to exist itself before me, eternally transcendent to my subjectivity, eternally independent of whatever I do or think or feel. Contemplation is the splendor of the object before the look of humility that desires it as such and refuses to alter it in any way.
But here comes the Kantian objection: we only know objects as objects of our representation, and not in themselves. This objection has always seemed tautological to me because it results in saying that we only hear what our ears hear, we only see what our eyes see, and so on. But you have to go through it. Every object is, in fact, an object of representation — even the senses give us only representative schemas, not objects “in themselves”. But here it is: once an object has come to our knowledge — through our representation — we have two alternatives: either thinking it, that is, making it a sign or concept that will enter the river of our thoughts beyond to be compared, transformed, refuted, etc., or, on the contrary, to wait to know it more and more, that is, to hope and to want it to give us more and more of itself. Any of our representative faculties may at any moment submit to their own internal mechanics or the object offered to them, may retreat to contemplate themselves or continue to stare at the object. I call the first alternative reflection (implying that there is also an imaginative, sentimental reflection, etc.) I call the second contemplation. When we persist in the contemplative attitude, the faculty, the representative channel becomes increasingly docile, more transparent, until, once a certain limit has been reached, the difference between what is projection and what is pure reception is manifested: assuming that I do not achieve, as Kant says, the ‘object in itself’ I get at least the distinction between what he gives me for himself and what I, for my part, project on it. It is, of course, an exercise in self-awareness, where, to the extent that I become aware of my own projective action, I can distinguish between the projected and the received, and finally attain the object as such, and no longer as mere representation (and much less projection) of mine. Kant’s mistake here was to confuse vulgar perception, which is fiercely projective, with loving, selfconscious contemplation, which ends by the evident and apodictic recognition of objectivity as such. The decisive difference is that of projecting a subjective desire, unrelated to the content offered by the object, or lovingly projecting the desire of the object as such.
The loving contemplation is therefore passive in relation to the object, active and critical in relation to the subject. It is to master yourself not to interfere, not to taint the object. (There is evidently some kinship between what I call loving contemplation and the Husserlian phenomenological reduction. The difference will appear in full clarity later.)
The loving contemplation always starts from an object of representation (or even an object of thought), to reach the point where the object speaks for itself, transcending the representative (or conceptual) channel that did not function except as the switch that triggers a mechanism that then escapes its control.
Now the only difference that exists in this sense between bodily and universal substances is that of the channel through which we first hear of their presence: the senses in the first case, abstract thought in the second. The senses give us, for example, news of a human presence (which we can then think or contemplate). Thought does not “capture” the universal, but gives us news of it through the logical contradiction we have come to in trying to deny it. This contradiction, which reflects the metaphysical necessity of the universal, can then simply be thought of or contemplated. In the latter case, the necessity of the universal becomes accepted, desired, loved, until it presents itself to us as something that embraces, shapes, statues us, and conserves us in existence and in the very act of meditating on it.
There is no gap, in this sense, between the philosophical knowledge of God, the mystical experience of God and the pure and simple love of God, but the perfect continuity of a contemplative intensification
The God of philosophers, if only of philosophers, would not be God, but only the concept of God, captured and then immediately thought, that is, mutilated, forgotten and denied. The God of philosophers is either the object of loving contemplation — acceptance, faith, desire — and is therefore the same God of the whole world, or is it just a thought God, a simulacrum of God, and therefore not the God of philosophers, but only the pure and simple devil. Here’s what Sto. Tomas perceived with perfect clarity and what Pascal did not want to perceive, moved by the pride of the humble and that tragic inner division of the mathematical thinker who, having abused reason, seeks a refuge in feeling, without realizing that he is only moving between the mental and the mental that the real object of their search is beyond this vulgar dispute between human faculties.
2. Knowledge and reality
It was through these considerations that I came to the conclusion of the total inanity of the disputes over the question: does thought capture reality or not? Thought never captures any reality, nor is it its function. Thought refers to reality in an exclusively intentional way through signs whose combinations do not express the real but the possible. The real as such is known only and exclusively by loving contemplation; thought (always in a broad sense) knows it only as an object of intentional meaning. But the real that comes to us, and that can be known by loving contemplation, is constituted only by the intensive (not extensive) universal and the singular beings that, in finite quantity (and either in isolation, or in groups, sets, orders, hierarchies, etc), enter the circle of our experience. Even supposing that we extended loving contemplation to all of them, and thus came to know an immense slice of the real, there would still be endless gaps. The knowledge we have about the intensive universal and the singular beings, all in all, is far from equaling the extensive universal. It is this gap that is filled by thought, or rather by the mental in general (which includes imagination, feeling, etc.) Thinking, imagining, etc., is just an effort to jump or fill the gap between the known world (intensive universal + singular beings) and the extensive universal. The proper object of the mental is the “unreal” possible — in all gradations of possibility, including necessity or logical certainty — and not the real. The mental gives us the structure of possible relationships within which we can conceive of what we do not know but which fills the gap between the known and the extensive universal. Our knowledge of this range is necessarily potential; by definition it never fully updates itself. Why can’t you upgrade? Because that would be to replace the real universal whole with a universal mental whole, which would absorb the real in itself, which is obviously a nonsense. The famous “limits of human knowledge” are just, finally, the limits of the mental. Loving contemplation, in itself, is neither limited nor limitless, for knowing only beings (including the universal) in each one’s singular totality does not add up or diminish.
It is now necessary to distinguish radically the loving contemplation from phenomenological reduction after having recognized their kinship. It aims at capturing “essences, ” that one captures the indissoluble unity of essence and existence, which we call the “singular being.” If we grasp the uniqueness of an entity, we grasp, in the same act, its essence, but not as a separate logical unit, but as the identity of a presence that immediately reveals what it is. In other words, we immediately grasp gender, species, and uniqueness in an indissoluble whole: to grasp ‘this pencil’ is not to grasp ‘pencil’ in general or ‘this object’ of indeterminate essence, nor is it to grasp an indefinite number of members of the ‘pencil’ species; it is to capture a particular member of a particular species and to capture it as existing here and now. Loving contemplation and phenomenological reduction resemble each other because they are contemplative, descriptive and non-analytical modes of knowledge. But the phenomenological reduction addresses the essence as distinct from existence, therefore to an “unreal” , whereas loving contemplation addresses the real as such, that is, the existence of an essence in a given and present being. The theory of loving contemplation is to Husserl’s phenomenology just as Aristotelianism is to Platonism, mutatis mutandis: the “beings” of my theory are to Husserl’s “essences” just as the Aristotelian “substance” is to platonic “ideas.” Husserl’s appeal — “Towards the very same things!” , Zu den Sachen selbst — cannot be fully met by phenomenology itself because it is not aimed at real things, but at separate essences. Husserl’s later attempt to reintegrate into his philosophical view the real things — by Lebenswelt theory — was late and was left alone in the program. It is this program that, in my own way, I try to accomplish, being faithful to the master to the extent that I move away from his methods without departing from his ideals, his values, his basic concepts, and his criteria of measurement. The Lebenswelt theory is the most meritorious attempt to reintegrate pre-philosophical knowledge into philosophy as the philosophically valid (or validated by reflection) root of philosophical knowledge itself. My effort is to go one step further, discerning the implicit methodology of pre-philosophical knowledge, which I call loving contemplation. Unbeknownst to it, the philosophers — with rare exceptions — have replaced the thought world with the given world, or, as poet Bruno Tolentino put it, the ‘world as an idea’ to the ‘world as such’. As long as this course continues, philosophy cannot escape the false dispute between those who want to embrace the world with thought and those who deny thought all the scope except that of conventional fiction. The former fall into the periodic disappointments of rationalism and end up in skepticism. The latter, not believing in pure theoretical knowledge, appeal to the dialectic of action and, in order to transform the world, end up creating a totalitarian ideology that, all in all, ends in absolute neo-rationalism. These errors are complementary and spin in a circle, producing one another.
But the theory of loving contemplation required, in addition, a theory of discourse, for the following reasons: If loving contemplation or pre-philosophical knowledge (intensified or not by philosophical reflection) gives us the knowledge of wholeness, that is, of unity as such, the mental gives us knowledge of the various forms of proportionality and harmony, that is, of the indirect forms of unity; These forms are indefinitely varied and complex, as well as the number of species and possible beings.
In this sense I say that all cognitive faculties — reasoning, imagination, feeling, etc— are rational: all are based on the principles of equivalence, proportionality and harmony, which translate into “quantitative” identity and unity mode.
3. Applications in Moral Philosophy
Moral philosophy, or ethics, must for me take the following course:
1. Distinguish between the moral codes historically in force in different eras and societies and the essential, universal morality, which is obtained by mere phenomenological reduction. These are made up of norms, in Kelsen’s sense, and Kelsen is made up of principles. The philosophical discussion of morals must stick to the field of principles. Thus, anthropological, sociological and historical relativism can be reconciled with the dogmatism of principles. These become known to the researcher by abstraction, but in themselves they are not abstract: they are the concrete content, the actual meaning behind historically prevailing norms. These are what, by indirectly and sometimes symbolically expressing the content of the principles, are abstract in relation to them.
2. The universal principles thus found must meet the following requirements:
3. They must be identically the same in all historically prevailing morals.
4. It has to be understood as logical assumptions in the practical application of these norms in all historically considered cases.
Among the principles thus found, the one of responsibility stands out. There is no moral system in the world that, behind its rules, does not have one of its foundations in the idea that:
1º , responsibility for certain facts must necessarily be imputed to their authors;
2º , these authors are always particular and concrete beings, substances in the Aristotelian sense, and never, under any circumstances, abstract collectives or mere “universals”;
3º , There is substantial continuity between the being who was the author of the act and the one to whom the responsibility for that act is subsequently attributed.
Historical morals differ greatly as to the categories of beings to which these principles should apply. Some societies include demons, the forces of nature, even animals among moral and legally imputable beings (until the 18th century the habit of punishing pigs invading plantations with excommunication persisted in the West). What is common to all is the belief in the principle of responsibility, the substantiality of the responsible entity and the substantial continuity of that entity in the transit between act and imputation. Once this point is made, the next task of moral philosophy is to rationally ground the principles thus found, that is, to base their extensive universality on a logical universality, or metaphysical necessity. The principle of responsibility is both cognitive and moral. It is the foundation of individual self-awareness, just as it is the foundation of historical morals: it contains the phenomenological description of individual consciousness and the underlying unity of historical morals. Moreover, dialectical and dialogical by essence and not by accident, the Philosophy moves incessantly towards Wisdom, and for this reason can only live well in a state of draft. It is no coincidence that the most impressive of the philosophical works, that of Aristotle, came to us only in this state of incompleteness and provisionality. The philosophical text will never have the formal, diamond-like perfection of the poem, for the perfection that philosophy seeks is for interior and mute excellence, impressive, as it were, and not expressive like artistic beauty.