Etienne Gilson's Realism

 I’m reading a lot of Etienne Gilson at the moment, dropping in and out of his books on Realism and Neo-Thomism.  He rightly scorns the idea that Cartesian methodic doubt can lead anywhere. Idealism has burned the bridge to anywhere and yet it fascinates by its apparent lucidity.  It establishes the problem field and keeps us stuck there with the endless toing and froing of the external and the internal world that act like the two ends of a seesaw.  

He writes of a Fr. Noel:

“Here we have finally come full circle, but the reader will be excused if he wonders why so much effort was expended creating the sensation of movement when in reality we have gone nowhere. First, we were told that we had to carry out an exhaustive, methodic doubt, but, since we were not permitted to doubt either thought or the fact of the existence of sensible reality, what did we actually doubt? Descartes’ doubt at least doubts something, but Monsignor Noel’s doubts nothing.”

It has been a notion of mine that Idealism is catching because it is easy to understand and modern psychology offers a specious basis.  Realism as offered by Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas is a difficult complex philosophy which starts out in the difficult terrain of ontology going from being to the real and knowledge of it.  Descartes as Gilson holds begins with epistemology and tries to catch hold of the real with Deus as the deus ex machina.  

Another point that Gilson controverts elsewhere is the doctrine of Jacques Maritain’s that an intuition of being is essential for a true comprehension of metaphysics.  He seems to me to have a strong argument.  I shall have to go back to ‘Degrees of Knowledge’ to try and comprehend the different levels of abstraction involved in the intuition of being.  I have this idea that Maritain may be conflating Aristotle and the Cartesian critical method moving from the initial judgement or apprehension i.e. it is and it is this, what is called an intuition.  Gilson maintains that the true Thomistic realism goes from Being to the Real.  

 

The analogies between this way of thinking and the Advaitic Realism are many.  Gilson’s clarity and explanatory power is excellent.  More anon.