My contention, then, is that everything depends, in the issue we are discussing, on the recognition of the existence of a spiritual unconscious, or rather, preconscious, of which Plato and the ancient wise men were well aware, and the disregard of which in favor of the Freudian unconscious alone is a sign of the dullness of our times. There are two kinds of unconscious, two great domains of psychological activity screened from the grasp of consciousness: the preconscious of the spirit in its living springs, and the unconscious of blood and flesh, instincts, tendencies, complexes, repressed images and desires, traumatic memories, as constituting a closed or autonomous dynamic whole. I would like to designate the first kind of unconscious by the name of spiritual or, for the sake of Plato, musical unconscious or preconscious; and the second by the name of automatic unconscious or deaf unconscious—deaf to the intellect, and structured into a world of its own apart from the intellect; we might also say, in quite a general sense, leaving aside any particular theory, Freudian unconscious. These two kinds of unconscious life are at work at the same time; in concrete existence their respective impacts on conscious activity ordinarily interfere or intermingle in a greater or less degree.… But they are essentially distinct and thoroughly different in nature. (91–92)
It is enough to think of the ordinary and everyday functioning of intellect, in so far as intellect is really in activity, and of the way in which ideas arise in our minds, and every genuine intellectual grasping, or every new discovery, is brought about; it is enough to think of the way in which our free decisions, when they are really free, are made, especially those decisions which commit our entire life—to realize that there exists a deep nonconscious world of activity, for the intellect and the will, from which the acts and fruits of human consciousness and the clear perceptions of the mind emerge, and that the universe of concepts, logical connections, rational discursus and rational deliberation, in which the activity of the intellect takes definite form and shape, is preceded by the hidden workings of an immense and primal preconscious life. Such a life develops in night, but in a night which is translucid and fertile, and resembles that primeval diffused light which was created first, before God made, as Genesis puts it, “lights in the firmament of heaven to divide the day from the night” so as to be “for signs, and for seasons, and for days and years.” (93–94)
If we are willing to forget the desperate syncretism of Maritain’s ploy and prepared to understand this “creative intuition” in terms of modern and contemporary aesthetics, his argument appears, if not acceptable, at least consistent.
What he is saying is that the foundation of a spiritual preconscious different from the unconscious of psychology is the foundation of a primum that is both psychological and ontological, a sort of archetypal Realm of the Mothers from which objective reality and personal spiritual activity itself both draw their nourishment. In this way we can understand poetic knowledge to be an affective connaturality that puts us into contact with the secret life of being itself, and whose principal organ is none other than intuition, prelogical imaginative activity, the only activity capable of grasping a deep reality that precedes logical distinctions and the duality of thought and being.
This is not an unheard-of philosophical position, and we cannot deny Maritain the right to espouse it. But Maritain insists on making Thomas’s doctrine of the intellect the foundation of this conception.
Over and above the conscious rational arguments by means of which reason makes itself manifest, he tells us, there exist the very springs of creativity and love “hidden in the primordial translucid night of the intimate vitality of the soul” (94). Now, he continues: “the Schoolmen were not interested in working out any theory about the unconscious life of the soul” (and we are grateful to him for this admission) “yet their doctrines implied its existence” (96).
To declare that in a given philosophical system a certain problematic issue is not openly mooted, but that its constituent elements, and to some extent its solution, emerge from the system’s very framework, is a legitimate position. A system is there to be interpreted, not only by contemporaries but also by posterity, and, since it claims to state truths about the world, it must be ready for any further developments in our knowledge of the world that might follow in its wake. But were the premises of this doctrine contained in Scholastic thought?
Maritain takes into consideration the Aristotelian notion of the agent intellect as inherited and elaborated upon by Thomas. The agent intellect engages in a process of intellectual abstraction performed on the contents of a possible intellect, which in and of itself would not be capable of a similar process of abstraction (given that it receives passively only what is presented to it by the senses). Maritain clearly embraces Thomas’s solution, which is opposed to Arabic attempts to locate the agent intellect somewhere outside of the individual soul.
But, in the Thomistic doctrine of the agent intellect, there is no suggestion of any sort of unconscious activity. We could at best speak of a lightning-fast operation, instinctive perhaps, but of which we are fully conscious at the moment we avail ourselves of it, at the moment, that is, when we recognize the universal form in the individual experience.
In fact, in the following comment the problem of the unconscious does not seem to arise (we might also say that Maritain is honest enough, in paraphrasing Thomas’s position, not to falsify its terms):
Thus, at a first step, the intelligible content present in the images, and which, in the images, was only intelligible in potency (or capable of being made capable of becoming an object of intellectual vision), is made intelligible in act in a spiritual form (specie impressa, impressed pattern), let us say, in an intelligible germ, which is received from the images by the intellect, under the activation of the Illuminating Intellect. But this is not yet enough for the attaining of knowledge. It is necessary that the intelligible content drawn from the images should be not only intelligible in act, or capable of becoming an object of intellectual vision, but intellected in act, or actually become an object of intellectual vision. Then it is the intellect itself, which, having been impregnated by the impressed pattern or intelligible germ, vitally produces—always under the activation of the Illuminating Intellect—an inner fruit, a final and more fully determined spiritual form (species expressa), the concept, in which the content drawn from the images is brought to the very same state of spirituality-in-act in which the intellect-in-act is, and in which this now perfectly spiritualized content is seen, is actually an object of intellectual vision. (97–98)
Here, Maritain’s seductive language is already beginning to color, with a kind of “imaginative efficacy,” what is, in Thomas’s version, one of the simplest procedures of the human intellect.
From all of the various texts in which Thomas expounds his doctrine of the intellect,16 we may derive the following cognitive moments:
(i) when our eyes rest upon a concrete object, our external senses receive by immutatio, or an act of receptivity on the part of the sentient bodily organ, the various qualitates sensibiles inherent in the object, classified as audibilia, visibilia, odorabilia, gustabilia and tangibilia—and they (our senses) receive them in the same way in which wax receives the imprint of the seal, as a species sensibilis, still a material phenomenon but already separate from the thing itself, and, so to speak, with a different makeup, “ut forma coloris in pupilla, quae non fit per hoc colorata” (“like the form of a color in the pupil of the eyes, which is not on that account colored”) (Summa Theologiae I, 78, 3);
(ii) the external senses transmit this species sensibilis to the internal senses (sensus communis, phantasia, memoria, vis aestimativa, or cogitativa);
(iii) common sense composes and reunites the various data received from the external senses and elaborates the kind of iconic image of the object known as the phantasma, which is received in the repository of forms or thesaurus formarum of the phantasia;
(iv) it is at this point that the agent intellect comes into the picture, abstracting from the phantasma (which displays all of the qualities of the object, including those that are accidental or individual) the species intelligibilis, which is no longer individual but universal (Stone, Tree, Human Being) and offering it to the Possible Intellect as locus specierum, which recognizes the quidditas of the object, elaborates its universal concept, and performs other operations of elaboration of what was offered to it;17
(v) there is of course nothing secret about these essential characteristics, but they are inscribed in the simple and immediate figure—considered as this topological terminatio—of the object, since they are at one and the same time its principle of existence and its principle of definability. Point v is fundamental if we are to grasp the full extent of the license taken by Maritain;
(vi) the intellect has only one way to reconsider the characteristics of the concrete object with which the cognitive process began, and it does so through the reflexio ad phantasmata; in this reconsideration it certainly knows all of the individual characteristics of the object (in the sense that it “sees” them, so to speak, in the phantasma), though it cannot be said that it enters into contact with the individual object, because cognitum est in cognoscente per modum cognoscentis (“the known is
