Maritain had attempted to identify both aesthetic pleasure and the creative act of the poetic imagination with an intuition that gave the impression of being overly subjective. As we see from his reading of the medieval authors, De Bruyne had realized that Maritain’s intuition did not have much to do with a “Kantian” subject, but had instead a great deal to do with a mystical intuition in which the subject identifies with (immerses himself in) the ontological splendor that fascinates and inspires him, in a union in which the two aspirations appear to become intermingled.
For De Bruyne on the other hand it was a question of establishing a distinction between the knowing subject and the object known, and at the same time between the function of the intellect and that of the sensibility. This is why he never speaks, as does Maritain, of creative intuition. He does, however, speak of intellectual intuition.
And here, De Bruyne is guilty of the same sin as Maritain, when he insists on finding in Thomas at all costs something it is difficult to attribute to him.
Already, in 1930, De Bruyne had written “Du rôle de l’intellect dans l’activité esthétique” (in Rintelen 1930), and he would take up a number of the same themes in his Esquisse d’une philosophie de l’art (1930b). He refused to speak of aesthetic intuition as an irrational act, but thought of it as a sort of instinctive synthesis in which the intellect played a constitutive role. What he had in mind was not an abstract synthesis but a process in which feeling played an essential role. In this essay the intellect in the intuition figured as the formal principle of the intuition of the concrete.
We have already observed how difficult it is to identify in Thomas a principle of intuition of the concrete, but De Bruyne attempted to balance the books as best he could. What De Bruyne actually theorizes is a variant of the Kantian idea of the aesthetic experience as disinterested pleasure, purposiveness without a purpose, universality without a concept, and regularity without law. What Kant meant was that not only may one feel pleasure in a beautiful object without wishing to possess it or to avail oneself of it physically in some way (and thus far Thomas would have been in agreement), but that we perceive it as organized toward a particular end, whereas its purpose is its own self-subsistence—this is why we view it as if it were the perfect incarnation of a rule, whereas it is simply a rule unto itself. Thus, a flower is a typical example of a beautiful thing, and in this sense we can understand why what is constitutive of the judgment of beauty is universality without a concept. The aesthetic judgment is not the affirmation that all flowers are beautiful, but the judgment that limits itself to saying that this flower is beautiful. The necessity that leads us to say that this flower is beautiful does not depend on an abstract chain of reasoning but on our sensation of that individual flower. This is why in this experience what we have is a free play of the imagination and the intellect.
I believe we can affirm that De Bruyne’s intellectual intuition is precisely this. Is it possible to find anything similar in the thought of Thomas? Can we speak of an intellectual intuition capable of bringing us to perceive an idea in the realm of the sensible without this idea being somehow already divorced from the sensible from which it has been abstracted?
In the same collection in which De Bruyne published his essay on the role of the intellect in aesthetic activity (Rintelen 1930), there appeared an article by Roland-Gosselin, “Peut-on parler d’intuition intellectuelle dans la philosophie Thomiste?”, in which this possibility is denied on convincing grounds citing a good number of persuasive textual references. Roland-Gosselin emphasizes the fact that—if we take the term “intuition” as it is defined in Lalande’s Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie, as, in other words, “a direct and immediate view of an object of thought currently present to the mind and grasped in its individual reality”—we cannot find such an intuition of the individual in Thomistic epistemology. She added that an intuition of this kind could be found if anywhere in John of Saint Thomas (Cursus I; Logica II, 23, 1),34 and it appears in any case in texts of the Franciscan school. In Thomas’s corpus direct knowledge of the object is possible only for creatures of pure spirit. As far as human knowledge is concerned, not even existence, place, or moment are the proper object of the senses, but are predicated by a more complex discursive act. In that first cognitive operation that is the simplex apprehensio (“direct apprehension”), all we have is the abstract apprehension of the essence. Human intellect is discursive and abstract—as a consequence (and this is my own personal comment on Roland-Gosselin), aesthetic pleasure too is perfected in the act of judgment that takes into account the individual elements recovered in the reflexio ad phantasmata.
Can we affirm that De Bruyne had occasion to reflect on the essay by Roland-Gosselin? Apparently not, since, even sixteen years later, in his Études, he is still seeking to identify in Thomas a theory of aesthetic intuition (in the second paragraph of the chapter dedicated to him).
In reconstructing Thomistic aesthetic thought De Bruyne insists particularly on what he considers the “discovery” of the Summa Theologiae, a discovery that for Thomas would mark a definite step forward with respect to his earlier writings.35 De Bruyne points out how Thomas borrows from Alexander of Hales a principle that the other medieval authors had neglected: if for predecessors such as Albertus Magnus the beautiful was still definable in terms of objective qualities, Thomas defines it in relation to the knowing subject. The notion of visa placent accentuates the subjective act of enjoyment which becomes constitutive of the aesthetic experience.
De Bruyne obviously makes it clear that there can be no question of establishing a predominance of subjective activity over the objective qualities of the object, and he cites an unequivocal passage from Thomas’s commentary In de divinis nominibus (398–399): “non enim ideo aliquod est pulchrum, quia nos illud amamus, sed quia est pulchrum et bonum, ideo amatur a nobis” (“in fact a thing is not beautiful because we love it, but, because it is beautiful and good, it is loved by us”).36 Still, it does not seem to him without importance that the good and the beautiful, although they are the same thing, are differentiated ratione: if the good is what everyone desires (“respicit appetitum”), the beautiful “respicit vim cognoscitivam” (“relates to the knowing power”), and therefore pulchra enim dicuntur quae visa placent (“those things are called beautiful which please when seen”) (Summa Theologiae I, 5 4 ad 1, my emphasis).
It is undeniable that for Thomas the beautiful, compared with the good, involves a relationship to the contemplative consciousness. Here, however, De Bruyne finds himself embarrassed by the fact that in the aesthetic experience there appear both a cognitive moment (apprehensio, visio) and what seems to him to be an emotive—today we would call it “passionate”—moment (placet, delectat). And he realizes the danger one might incur by following the route indicated by Maritain.
Can we concur with Maritain that aesthetic pleasure “is the quieting of our power of desire, which rests in the good that belongs to the cognitive power perfectly and harmoniously put into action” (“l’apaisement de notre puissance du désir, qui repose dans le bien propre de la puissance cognitive parfaitement et harmonieusement mise en acte”), to the point that “a being who, per absurdum, possessed only intellect, would have the perception of the beautiful in its roots and in its objective conditions, but not in the delight by means of which alone this perception is brought to completion” (“un ëtre qui, par l’absurde, n’aurait que l’intellect, aurait la perception du beau dans ses racines et dans ses conditions objectives, mais non dans le plaisir par lequel seule cette perception est portée à son achèvement”)? Or will we admit the thesis that Maritain is combating, namely, that the act of knowledge alone can produce the experience of the beautiful?37
In an attempt to disentangle this knot, De Bruyne reminds us that every natural operation in Thomas, including that of intelligence, occurs with a specific end in mind and presupposes an inclination, a tendency, a love. The “passionate” moment, then, of the aesthetic experience should come into play at the stage of the initial act of the knowing intellect. But there is no pleasure in or love for an object without a “practical” consciousness and (De Bruyne does not use this expression, though his discourse implies the concept) its concrete and individual perception. Which is tantamount to saying that
