The Origin of Thought
Introduction
Those who are familiar with the life of Antonio Rosmini will recall that he began to read and write at the age of five. Even at an early age he developed a great love of reading and research. ‘There seems little doubt that at the age of sixteen, the foundations of immense erudition had been laid, and that Rosmini had formulated for himself a rigorous method of study which precluded the waste of a single instant.’[1] Indeed Rosmini must have had a photographic mind and the highest powers of concentration. ‘The vast extent of his reading may be inferred from the simple fact that in those days [early youth]he had carefully studied, as Don Paoli tell us, the works of the six hundred and twenty authors consulted for his Logica and his Diritto…He[set out to make] himself master of St Augustine and St Thomas, St Bonaventure and the other Schoolmen; of Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Descartes, Locke, Leibnitz, Condillac, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and of all the works of the modern rationalists and materialists.’[2] It is, indeed, a mystery how he was able to absorb so much knowledge and how he managed to publish so many works in the limited time at his disposal. His letters alone run to thirteen volumes, with others not yet published and it is said that he received no less than 60,000! The present edition of his works, under publication is to number about 80 volumes.
Coupled with an insatiable quest for knowledge was his passionate pursuit for the truth. In his Introduction to Philosophy he says, ‘The human mind, although created for truth, is easily led astray by an alien, hostile principle which lures it into mistaking the outward show of truth for truth itself. In us, the will following the promptings of the mind, clutches at the empty, outward show of the good rather than the true good for which it was created. This is the cause of error and guilt’.[3] He saw the task of the philosopher as being to expose error and to correct it. He wrote to a friend in 1816, — he was 19 at the time — that philosophy was ‘the great, first and fundamental study, the principle and key to all others’.[4]
In 1823, a year after concluding his university studies and receiving his degrees in theology and canon law, he visited Rome, but in spite of making some notable friends there who wished him to stay, he returned to Rovereto and immersed himself in serious political studies. He was motivated by the political situation at the time and also by the reading of various authors.[5] But he was not satisfied with his progress, and also it did not take him long to realise that in order to correct erroneous theories in politics he would have to establish a sound philosophical basis which would show up their errors. In other words it was people’s thinking that had to be corrected first, not just the political statements that issued from it.[6] He therefore interrupted his political studies and immersed himself in philosophical theories. It would not be until 1839 that he published his first major political work.[7] Writing many years later in his Introduzione alla Filosofia (1850) Rosmini says that he was confirmed in his intention to attempt to restore philosophy through the encouragement given him by his friend Mauro Capellari, then a Cardinal, and later Gregory XVI. The latter urged him to write and publish the Nuovo Saggio dell’origine delle idee[8] which was only an outline at the time. He wrote this work in 1829 and 1830. He was also encouraged to write by Pius VIII who urged him to write, as a duty. The aim was to combat sensism, the source of so many errors and evils.[9]
But ‘what is philosophy’? It is essentially the reply to our ceaseless questioning. But not all replies constitute philosophising. We can obtain partial answers which satisfy us for a while but then demand further questions and further answers. This constitutes our progress in knowledge and we are doing it all the time. We notice this curiosity particularly in children. But philosophy, strictly speaking, consists in linking up and ordering our questions and their solutions so that one depends on the other until we arrive finally at the ultimate question, the ultimate rung on the ladder. Rosmini defines philosophy as the ‘the study of the ultimate reasons’.[10] These ultimate reasons are the answers which satisfy the last questions put by the human mind to itself. There are two classes of ultimate reasons, those concerned with the whole of knowledge, general philosophy, and those which concern a special part of it, special philosophies. We can have a philosophy of science, a philosophy of physics, a philosophy of politics. But only the former, are strictly speaking ultimate because the second class are ultimate only in their own branch of philosophy. We shall be dealing with general philosophy.
In his Introduction to Philosophy Rosmini likens human knowledge to ‘a pyramid in the form of a tetrahedron. Its base is immense and made up of countless individual truths, like so many stones. On top of these is laid another row consisting of the universal truths closest to individual truths. There are a large number of them but not as many as in the first row. As one gradually ascends to the tiers above, each stratum has a smaller number of truths with ever greater potentiality and universality until, at the summit, number itself disappears into unity. At this stage, universality has reached its full, infinite potential in the last tetrahedron at the summit of the pyramid’. ‘It is the task of philosophy to determine the principles or primary reasons of all knowledge and to describe in precise language this high point of the huge pyramid of human knowledge’[11]. Rosmini goes on to say that a series of more elevated truths carries within itself every lower order of truths. It is not difficult to understand that in this pyramid of knowledge the most general ideas towards the summit contain within them potentially the more determinate ideas of the lower orders.
The Source of our Knowledge
But what is the origin of our knowledge, of these truths?
We can begin our investigation with two obvious facts, we feel and we think. Common sense, never mind philosophical demonstration, tells us that these two activities are totally different. We have sensations and ideas and these are contrary experiences. There is a world of difference between thinking of a glass of beer and actually drinking it. We learn languages so that we can understand the ideas expressed by words which are foreign to us. If we do not know the language we simply hear sounds. A basic difference between sensations and ideas is that our sensations are totally private to us. We can discuss them with other people and we can agree on what they signify. We do this through our ideas. But I can’t feel your toothache. I can feel my toothache and you will understand what I mean. When either of us has toothache we will probably ends up at the dentist who puts things right. But you do not know what my toothache feels like by experiencing it. You can experience only your own toothache. If we both look at a bluish-green book we might argue whether it is blue or green, because our sensations are subjective to us. We can discuss the colour because our idea of colour is the same. My sensations correspond with the idea of blue or green. But I simply do not know whether your sensation of green is the same as mine, the book may look yellow to you! I know only that we share our ideas in common. If we know this, of course, we realise immediately that our ideas are not subjective. They must be objective even though our private sensations play some part in their formation. ‘…sensation means simply some modification in us, while idea means mental conception of something that exists, independently of any modification or experience in another being’.[12]
Indeed common sense also tells us that we increase in knowledge through observing the world around us and absorbing real experiences fed into us through the senses. Our bodies and minds are constantly being fed external data. Any school girl or school boy will understand this only too well especially when they are cramming for examinations! What we sense, therefore, plays a part in our knowledge, in the formation of our ideas.
When Rosmini wrote his basic philosophical work Nuovo saggio sull’origine delle idée he approached his task firstly with a critique of the attempts of other philosophers to explain the genesis of our knowledge.
At the time when Rosmini was at senior school (1814) the empiricism of Locke played an important part in the philosophical thought of the time, a Catholic had to harmonise it as well as he could with revealed religion. Reid and Stewart had quite a strong following and the impact of Kant was felt all over Europe. Rosmini was influenced by all these and also by his early studies of Kant, Schelling and Hegel. But, on the other hand he had never lost his love for St Thomas. In 1823 he wrote to Tommaseo, ‘I have begun the work on St Thomas, a genius as great, in my opinion, as Newton. I am writing it in Latin. First I upbraid the Italians for not knowing the treasure they possess, and tell them the glory that should be theirs from so great a man. Having shown what St Thomas did for theology, I examine the reasons why is no longer studied, and I find it in the ill-repute of the philosophy of Aristotle, which I try to appraise. I then speak of those aspects of that philosophy which I think should be revived, showing that such a revival would suit the present day admirably. …I think this compendium of Aristotle’s philosophy purged and perfected by the great mind of St Thomas, is the only way to help in understanding and appreciating the works of that great man.’[13]
It is not surprising, then, to find that his first volume of the Nuovo saggio consists in a critique of the modern philosophers, but including also Plato and Aristotle. He classifies these philosophers into two groups, those who erred by defect and those who erred by excess, that is to say, those who failed to observe all the facts about the problem of knowledge, and those who failed by admitting far more than was required. The first group consisted of Locke, Condillac, d’Alembert, Reid, Stewart, Smith Berkeley and Hume, the second group, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Leibniz and Kant. Unfortunately time does not permit us to deal with this part of Rosmini’s work except in passing.
The Origin of our Ideas
The Problem
Any thinking depends on making judgements and judgements are made up of ideas. For instance in order to say, this stone is white we must have the idea of the subject stone and the abstract idea of the colour white, the predicate. Moreover the predicate must always contain an element of universality. White can be applied not simple to this stone but any stone which has this quality and not only to stones, but to sheets of paper, animals and so on. Now where does this element of universality come from? How does it arise in the mind? It could be shown that all judgements demand that the mind must possess some universal simply by examining them all but to save time we can accept this as a fact. We can define a judgement as, an intellectual operation of the mind by which we join a given predicate with a given subject. Now this joining of a predicate with a subject implies that we firstly know the predicate distinct from the subject otherwise we could not join them together. In the above example I must already possess the idea of stone, applying it to this object (‘this is a stone’) and have the idea of whiteness applying it to this particular stone (‘this stone is white’).
But a difficulty now arises. If no judgement can be made without ideas, where do these ideas come from?
Two ways present themselves, 1) abstraction, 2) judgement. In the first case we can separate the common element in the particular idea from the proper element in it. We can fix our attention on the common element in this idea and disregard what is proper. For example I have an idea of a human being (rational animal), but I can disregard what is proper to ‘human being’ (rationality) and fix my attention on what he/she has in common with other beings, namely animality. But the problem here is that we already have the idea, which is common and universal in this case ‘human being’. Otherwise we could not perform any abstraction on it. All we are doing is to fix our mind on an element of it.
This leaves the second way, a judgement. But, as we have said, every judgement presupposes a universal idea. A judgement is an operation of the mind in which a universal idea is applied to a subject, thus placing it in the class of things designated by the predicate. The judgement, this mountain is high places this mountain in the category of high mountains. This reasoning applies to all judgements.
If then we cannot explain the formation of universal ideas by abstraction or judgement then we are forced to the conclusion that some universal idea pre-exists all judgements in human beings enabling them to judge and then, through their judgements, gradually to form other ideas.
(Just in passing, Plato thought that we were born with lots of pre-existing ideas, but he was one of the philosophers who erred by excess. Rosmini will show that we need only one.)
The Existence of the Idea of Being
Rosmini begins the solution to this conundrum by stating that we think of being in a general way. This means ‘thinking of the quality common to all things, while ignoring all other qualities, generic, specific or proper’. We, here, concentrate our attention on ‘being’, the quality common to all things.
Father Francesco Paoli tells how Rosmini told him,
When I was studying philosophy at Rovereto I was walking one day long the Viale della Terra,[14] totally wrapt up in my thoughts turning my attention to one thought and then another, when I suddenly saw each of them was not simple but appeared to me as a group of many objects. Examining this more carefully I saw that, rather than being many objects, they ought to be called many determinations of a more universal and less determinate object, which contained them all. When I analysed this object in the same way as I had the preceding ones, I noticed that the same conditions applied to it, and that when those less definite determinations, which it still retained, were removed by means of abstraction, it appeared as a new object, even more universal and less determined than the previous one. I say new in reference to my intuition of it (because I had not yet looked at its new aspect) but not new in itself for it contained not only the object resulting from my analysis but also the others which I had analysed previously. Continuing this process, no matter from where I started I found I always arrived at the most universal object ideal being (idea of being) divested of all determinations so that it was no longer possible to abstract anything from it without annihilating thought. I saw at once that it contained all the objects which I had already contemplated. I then verified this process. This consisted in seeking to discover what were the first possible determinations of indeterminate being and then which came next and so on to the last. By this synthesis I found again all those objects which had disappeared from my intellectual attention through my previous analysis. I then became convinced that ideal indeterminate being must be the first truth, naturally known and the first thing known through immediate intuition and the great means of all knowledge that is, whether perceived or intuited.[15]