DESCARTES AND THE CRITERION OF TRUTH

Paul Gerard Horrigan, Ph.D., 2022.

René Descartes’s adherence to the principle of immanence (his voluntaristic universal

methodic doubt and rejection of an immediate knowledge of extra-mental, sensible things in the
external world in favor of “ideas” as the immediately known), will affect his views concerning
the ultimate criterion of truth, which, for him, cannot be the intrinsic, immediate, objective
evidence of the extra-mental, sensible reality before me in the real, extra-mental world (e.g., this
pine tree in front of me, that sleeping dog in front of me, as upheld by metaphysical
realism/methodical realism/moderate realism). For the author of the Discourse on Method
(Discours de la méthode, 1637) the Meditations on First Philosophy (Meditationes de prima
philosophia, 1641) and the Principles of Philosophy (Principia philosophiae, 1644), the criterion
of truth is the clearness and distinctness of an idea.1 For metaphysical realism/methodical
realism/moderate realism grounded in an act of being (esse as actus essendi) realist metaphysics,
“evidence is the presence of a reality which is clearly and unequivocally given: the fact that the
known is found before the knower in its very reality, the reality itself is present…Just as truth is
based on the being of the thing, the awareness of the possession of truth is based on the objective
obviousness of reality. Any attempt to establish a presumed subjective foundation for certainty
would fall into a vicious circle, as happens in the case of the Cartesian criteria for clarity and
distinctness of ideas…The sort of evidence which we are examining – immediate evidence –
imposes itself upon us: in some sense it forces the intellect to assent. But it also happens that
man, because of his freedom, can even attempt to resist this immediate evidence and, by
doubting, suspend judgment even of the first principles of the intellect and of sense evidence; he
can, in sum, decide to doubt everything. This is the intention of Descartes who proposes to make
methodic doubt universal. This has to be decided upon voluntarily: one decides to doubt
everything. Whether or not one can really achieve this presumed universal doubt is another
question.”2 “L’evidenza ci cui parliamo non si confonde con l’idea chiara e distinta cartesiana.
Parliamo della manifestazione o trasparenza di una realtà al nostro sguardo conoscitivo, non
della chiarezza di un’idea. Cartesio cercava un tipo speciale di chiarezza nelle idee, per poterle
poi attribuire alla realtà. Partiva quindi dall’immediatezza del pensiero, dopo aver bloccato

1
For metaphysical realist critiques of Descartes’s immanentism, see, for example, Leonardo Polo’s Evidencia y
realidad en Descartes, third edition, EUNSA, Pamplona, 2007, 309 pages; chapter 5 (Cartesian Mathematicism),
chapter 6 (Cartesian Spiritualism), chapter 7 (Cartesian Idealism) and chapter 8 (The Breakdown of Cartesianism)
of Étienne Gilson’s The Unity of Philosophical Experience, Ignatius Press, 1999, pp. 97-176.
2
A. LLANO, Gnoseology, Sinag-Tala, Manila, 2001, pp. 42-43, 45. “L’evidenza è la presenza di una realtà che si
dà in modo chiaro e inequivocabile: il fatto per cui il conosciuto è di fronte al conoscente nella propria realtà, cioè
che si fa presente la realtà stessa…Come la verità si basa sull’essere della cosa, così la coscienza di possedere la
verità si basa sulla manifestazione obiettiva della realtà. Il voler porre un presunto fondamento soggettivo della
certezza, conduce in un circolo vizioso, come avviene, ad esempio, per il criterio cartesiano della chiarezza e
distinzione delle idee…Tale tipo di evidenza, l’immediata, si impone di per sé e forza in un certo modo l’intelletto
all’assenso. Tuttavia, può succedere che l’uomo, in quanto dotato di libertà, non esiti a resistere a tale immediata
manifestazione; può decidere di sospendere il giudizio, può cioè dubitare perfino dei primi principi dell’intelletto e
delle evidenze sensibili; l’uomo ha quindi la possibilità di proporsi di dubitare di tutto. È questo il tentativo
cartesiano, il cui dubbio metodico aspira a divenire universale e, naturalmente, deve essere frutto di una libera
decisione: si vuole dubitare di tutto. Che poi un tale dubbio universale possa mai realizzarsi è tutt’altro
problema.”(A. LLANO, Filosofia della conoscenza, Le Monnier, Florence, 1987, pp. 44-45, 47).

1
l’immediatezza del mondo. Alcune idee possono essere molto chiare (un’idea numerica o
geometrica, 2+2=4), eppure non attestano una realtà esistenziale. Invece l’albero davanti a me è
palese come una realtà esistente. Chiamiamo dunque evidenti sia le cose che conosciamo in
modo immediato sia le corrispondenti proposizioni («il fiume Tevere esiste» è una proposizione
evidente, sopratutto per i romani).”3 In his critique of Descartes’s criterion of truth in the clear
and distinct idea, F.-J. Thonnard writes: “At first blush, this criterion seems close to the notion of
evidence, in which St. Thomas sees the sign of truth. The criterion of is not purely subjective, as
some have said; it does not signify that everything which seems to us clear and distinct is true. In
Descartes’ view, these ideas are not fabricated at will; they are in us without our will.
Nevertheless, the Cartesian criterion has no purely objective value, and is different from that of
evidence in two ways: a) In Thomism, the passivity of our knowledge4 is a fact granted as
incontestable. Evidence is the constraining influence from the object itself which manifests itself
as it is and thus produces adequation between what is known and the knower. This evidence
resolves clearly the double problem of epistemology. For one meets it, either in the abstract
natures of intelligence or in the concrete objects of sensible intuition; one meets it even in the
collaboration of these two faculties, inasmuch as the same object (this man, for example) seized
by sense evidently appears as identical with the content of the abstract idea (for example, the
idea of substance or of humanity). Thus the immediate support of the truth of external reality to
our consciousness is the sensible world, from which we mount towards God by means of
analogy.

“The clear idea, on the contrary, does not have its clarity from the object, but of itself; or,
better, from God, Who has deposited it within us. This explains Descartes’ tendency to express
univocally the divine thoughts and God Himself, for it is through their intermediary that we
arrive at knowledge of the sensible world. This also explains the Cartesian tendency to conclude
from rational evidence to the real existence of the object considered, and its failure to distinguish
the two problems of ideal truth and extra-mental reality; our thoughts, so to speak, measures the
truth of things. For it is the property of the Divine Ideas to be creative of their objects, and the
clear idea of Descartes becomes a participation of the Divine Ideas. The initial doubt, which cuts
off all connections with the external world, demands this solution, except, perhaps, for the idea
of the self. But even for this latter idea, Descartes prefers the guarantee of the divine influence to
that of the object.

“b) In Thomism, evidence does not justify the idea but rather the judgment, which alone
is the depositary of full truth; the judgment is, moreover, a purely intellectual action, admitting
the influence of the will only in its imperfect forms (e.g., opinion). This shows proper respect for
discursive reasoning, which is a purely immanent activity, wholly subject to the influence of the
evident object.

“Cartesian evidence is not concerned with justifying the judgment, which is never
infallible, but only with the idea. The latter, by its intuitive character, has the value of judgment
or of principle, but is conceived as a simple act, a pure, static, intellectual reflection of an object
which has come from God. This is a misunderstanding of the proper nature of our abstractive

3
J. J. SANGUINETI, Introduzione alla gnoseologia, Le Monnier, Florence, 2003, p. 276.
4
This passivity does not, for that matter, exclude activity, as that of the judgment, the reasoning process and
abstraction.

2
intelligence. Kant will rediscover the notion of the activity of the intelligence, and the
importance of judgment in epistemology, though he will confuse immanent activity with
production, which is a transitive action.”5

Celestine Bittle’s Critique of Descartes’s Criterion of Truth: “False Criteria of Truth.

Descartes…Descartes considered ‘clear and distinct ideas’ to be the criterion of
truth…According to Descartes, the things of which we have a clear and distinct idea are true. He
accepted his own existence as true, because he had a ‘clear’ and ‘distinct’ idea of it. This, then,
became for him the criterion of truth.

“Now, the ‘clearness’ and ‘distinctness’ of our ideas can be taken subjectively and
objectively. Taken subjectively, it means that the idea as a subjective product of the intellect is
clearly and distinctly conceived; it is clear and distinct to the intellect. But this does not give us a
guarantee that this idea corresponds to reality, and that the reality represented in the idea actually
exists. I can have, for instance, a very clear and distinct idea of a centaur or a fairy or a
mythological deity; but does that mean that such beings exist? To distinguish between such
beings and ‘real’ beings I need some criterion different from the subjectively clear and distinct
ideas of them. Taken objectively, it means that the idea is clear and distinct as an interpretative
representation of reality; the idea is such, because the reality itself is clear and distinct before the
mind. In that case, however, we have immediate, objective evidence of reality as the criterion of
truth, and not the mere clearness and distinctness of the idea as such. Descartes, however, took
this criterion in a subjective sense, because he maintained that the external world cannot be
presented to the spiritual mind. As such, his criterion of a ‘clear and distinct idea’ is inadequate,
since it can never show us whether our judgments agree with reality.”6

Guido Berghin-Rosè’s Critique of Descartes’s Criterion of Truth. “Il criterio di verità

proposto da Cartesio. Il criterio cartesiano. Cartesio, cercando di dubitare di tutto, si incontra
nella coscienza di esistere come essere pensante (cogito, ergo sum) e si accorge di non poterne
dubitare in alcun modo. Cercando poi la ragione di tale certezza, cioè che cosa garantisce la
verità del «cogito», osserva che non è altro che la chiarezza e distinzione di tale concetto; ora
essa non garantirebbe nulla in un caso se non fosse sempre sicura; stabilisce dunque il criterio
generale: «ogni idea chiara e distinta è vera»,7 in cui idea «chiara e distinta» significa: idea netta
e ben differenziata dalle altre (distinta) e che mi colpisce fortemente, quasi mi si impone appena
vi penso (chiara).8

“Questo è il criterio cartesiano detto appunto «criterio dell’idea chiara e distinta». In esso
ciò che assicura della verità è l’evidenza o chiarezza, non però dell’oggetto, bensì dell’idea
dell’oggetto, è la chiarezza come dote dell’idea, è cioè un’evidenza soggettiva.

5
F.-J. THONNARD, A Short History of Philosophy, Desclée, Tournai, 1956, pp. 504-505.
6
C. N. BITTLE, Reality and the Mind, Bruce, Milwaukee, 1959, pp. 311, 330, 311-312.
7
«Mi sembra pertanto di poter assumere come criterio generale che tutte le cose che concepiamo con assoluta
chiarezza e distinzione sono vere»(Meditazione terza, paragr. 1, Mondadori, Milano 1942, p. 55).
8
«Claram voco illam quae menti attendenti praesens et aperta est: sicut ea clare a nobis videri dicimus quae, oculo
intuenti praesentia, satis fortiter et aperte illum movent. Distinctam autem illam quae…ab omnibus aliis ita seiuncta
est et praecisa ut nihil plane aliud quam clarum est, in se contineat».(Principi I, 45).

3
 “Questo criterio informò di sè l’indirizzo razionalistico postcartesiano (Malebranche,
Spinoza, Leibniz…fino a Wolff), che tende a costruire la filosofia per pura analisi di idee innate.
Fu mentalità dominante nell’illuminismo fino alla rivoluzione francese. È il criterio di verità
dell’idealismo. Spesso nella filosofia moderna e specialmente nell’idealismo diviene, come
«criterio della sistematicità», il criterio di valutazione di un sistema: un sistema ben organico,
intimamente coerente è senz’altro ritenuto vero. La chiarezza di una dottrina è ancora spesso il
criterio di preferenza, anche in questioni particolari (Vedi Cosmologia, n. 65).

“Giudizio: 1) L’evidenza soggettiva non è un criterio di verità. Verità significa

essenzialmente adeguazione tra conoscenza e cosa (mentale o extramentale). Ora la chiarezza e
la distinzione dell’idea in se stessa, non provano questa corrispondenza: potrebbero essere
dovute a fattori puramente soggettivi. Un’idea, per chiara e distinta che sia, può sempre essere
una pura costruzione soggettiva, finchè non è provato che questa chiarezza le viene dalla cosa.
Viceversa un’idea oscura e imprecisa può benissimo essere vera, anzi, siccome il mondo è opera
di una mente superiore alla nostra, ben poche idee vere riusciranno ad essere totalmente chiare e
distinte.

“Così in Cosmologia (n. 64 ss.) si è dimostrato che il meccanicismo che nega le qualità e
spiega tutto con estensione e moto locale, pur essendo una dottrina chiara in se stessa,9 è falso.
Invece la dottrina che ammette le qualità, pur non potendo raggiungere la chiarezza completa, è
vera.

“2) Il criterio cartesiano, se inteso come unico supremo criterio di verità, conduce
all’idealismo e perciò è falso. Se infatti questo è l’unico criterio, ogni mia certezza non può
riguardare che idee, stati di coscienza, delle quali soltanto ho un’evidenza.

“Prova l’inevitabilità di questa conseguenza il tentativo stesso di Cartesio. Egli cerca di

dare valore oggettivo al suo criterio appoggiandolo sulla veracità di Dio. Dopo aver raggiunto
l’esistenza di Dio, mediante l’argomento ontologico ed il principio di causalità (n. 32),
attribuisce a Dio l’origine delle idee fondamentali (che nell’uomo sono innate): la Sua veracità
garantirà quindi la verità di quelle chiare e distinte.

“Questa argomentazione però è sofistica perchè, come si è notato, la dimostrazione

dell’esistenza di Dio implica o un transitus de genere ad genus o almeno, in ogni caso,10 un
circolo vizioso in quanto usa delle idee il cui valore oggettivo non sarà confermato che in seguito
alla dimostrazione stessa.11

“Rimane dunque che il criterio cartesiano, ammesso come unico supremo, conduce
all’idealismo e perciò è falso.

“Nota. – Unico valore della chiarezza interna di un’idea o di una dottrina qualsiasi è
quella di un indizio: può far arguire che si sia colta la verità. Non aquista però valore di prova se

9
E proprio anche per questo accettata da Cartesio. Cosmologia, n. 65, b.
10
Cioè anche quando l’esistenza di Dio è provata col principio di causalità.
11
Vedi: Meditazioni metafisiche, terza e quarta meditazione; Discorso sul metodo, parte quarta.

4
non appoggiandosi sull’evidenza oggettiva ed anche come indizio non è, come si è detto, molto
forte.”12

Jacques Maritain’s Critique of Descartes’s Immanentist, Rationalist, Innatist Angelism:

“The Angel and Reason. Let us try to find the right names for things: the sin of Descartes is a sin
of angelism. He turned Knowledge and Thought into a hopeless perplexity, an abyss of unrest,
because he conceived human Thought after the type of angelic Thought. To sum it up in three
words: What he saw in man’s thought was Independence of Things; that is what he put into it,
what he revealed to it about itself. Surely, you say, the crime is wholly mental, perpetuated in the
third degree of abstraction; does it concern anyone but lunatics in long pedants’ robes, those who
have themselves bound in calf, as Councillor Joachim des Cartes said of his son? It has
influenced some centuries of human history and havoc, of which the end is not in sight. Before
indicating its consequences let us consider it in itself, and try to show its chief characteristics.

“According to St. Thomas’s teaching, the human intellect is the last of the spirits, and the
most remote from the perfection of the divine Intelligence. As the zoophyte bridges the gap
between two kingdoms, so the rational animal is a transitional form between the corporeal world
and the spiritual world. Above it, crowded like sea sand, rise in countless multitude the pure
spirits in their hierarchies. These are thinking substances in the true sense of the word, pure
subsistent forms, who certainly receive existence and are not existence, as God is, but they do
not inform matter and are free from the vicissitudes of time, movement, generation and cor-
ruption, of all the divisions of space, all the weaknesses of individuation by materia signata; and
each concentrates in himself more metaphysical stuff than the whole human race together. Each
by itself is a specific type, and exhausts the perfection of its essence, and therefore they are
borne, from the moment of their creation, to the complete fullness of their natural possibilities,
incorrupt by definition. They raise above our heads a canopy of immensity, an abundance of
stability and strength which, in comparison with us, is infinite. Transparent each to his own
glance; each with full perception of his own substance by that substance, and at a single leap
naturally knowing God also — by analogy, no doubt, but in what a mirror of splendour: their
intellect, always in act with regard to its intelligible objects, does not derive its ideas from things,
as does ours, but has them direct from God, Who infuses them into it when He creates it. And by
these innate ideas, which are in it as a derivation from the divine Ideas, their intellect knows
created things in the creative light itself, rule and measure of all that is. Infallible, then, and even
impeccable in the natural order, considered apart from the supernatural end: autonomous and
self-sufficing, so far as a creature can be self-sufficing: the life of the angels is an endless
outflow of thought, knowledge, and will, without weariness or sleep. Piercing, in the perfect
clearness of their intuitions, not, of course, the secrets of hearts nor the unfolding of future
contingencies, but all essences and all laws, the whole substance of this universe ; knowing the
power and actions of fire, water, air, the stars, the heavens, all other bodies, as distinctly as we
know the different occupations of our workmen, they are finally, without hands or machines, as
masters and possessors of nature,13 and can play upon nature as on a guitar by modifying the
movement of the atoms at their will. In all this we are speaking of the attributes of the angelic
nature considered in itself, and, apart from its elevation to the supernatural order, as it subsists in

12
G. BERGHIN-ROSÈ, Elementi di filosofia, vol. 5 (Critica), Marietti, Turin, 1958, op. cit., nos. 74-75, pp. 68-69.
13
Cf. Disc. de la Méth. Vie P., (A.-T., VI, 62).

5
fallen and faithful spirits alike. That is the model on which a son of Touraine set out one day to
reform the human mind.

“Consider the three great notes of angelic Knowledge – Intuitive, as to its mode, Innate as
to its origin, Independent of things, as to its nature. You find these three same notes again,
transposed certainly, but not less fundamental and not less manifest, in human Knowledge
according to Descartes.

“Descartes’s first effort, as we know, aims at freeing philosophy from the burden of
discursive reasoning, at opposing to the laborious farrago of the School and its swarm of
syllogisms raised one on another a ready, distinct, level science, a sheet of clearness. But see
where that search for the simple actually leads. When our understanding apprehends, judges, and
reasons, it is no longer tied down to three operations irreducibly distinct in nature. It has but one
function: vision. A fixing of the pure and attentive intelligence on such or such object of thought,
with well defined lines, with nothing of the implicit or virtual, grasped fully and wholly by
absolutely original and primary vision and with a certitude grounded on itself alone—that is what
Descartes calls intuition, ‘intuitus,’14 and it is to that henceforth that everything in the cognizant
understanding is reduced.

“For Descartes makes the judgement, the operation of assenting, of interior conviction,
no longer belong to the understanding, but to the will, which alone is active: it is a decision of
the will, which comes to agree to an idea as a faithful representation of what is, or may be.

“And after ‘intuition,’ he does indeed admit another operation, which is ‘deduction,’ the
operation of reasoning; but that consists of nothing more than constructing new objects of
apprehension by combining intuitions; a concession perforce to discursive reasoning but clumsy
and contradictory, which destroys the unity belonging to reasoning and the continuity of logical
movement and replaces it by a discontinuous succession of motionless glances.15 To reason is no
longer to be led by the principle to see the consequence, it is to see the principle and its
connexion with the consequence together. Behind the banal attacks on the syllogism in the
Regulae, we must see a tenacious zeal to reject that work of patient production of certitude which
constitutes the life of the reason as such, and by which, considering one truth in the light of
another, a new light is born and rises in us, in which what was virtual and hidden in the truth
already known shines out clearly.

“This logical denial is of peculiar importance. To lay hands on the syllogism is to lay
hands on human nature. What Descartes really attacks, in his impatience of the servitude of
discursive work, is the potentiality of our intellect, that is to say, its specifically human
weakness, what makes it a reason. So by curious chance the first move of rationalism is to
disown reason, to do violence to its nature, to challenge the normal conditions of its activity.

14
Cf. Regulae ad directionem ingenii, Reg. 3, A. T., t. X, 368; Reg. 10 (X, 419-425).
15
Cf. Hannequin: la Méthode de Descartes, Rev. de Mét et de Mor., 1906; Hamelin: le Système de Descartes, p. 82.
Hamelin writes very justly (p. 87): “Descartes’s whole theory of knowledge is, then, summed up in this, that to
know is to apprehend by an infallible intuition simple natures and the links of those simple natures, which are
themselves simple natures.”

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Behold it reconstructed after an intuitive type, stiff in the tinsel of pure intelligence and in a
parcelling-out of comprehending immobilities.

“The secret desire of the intelligence in search of a superhuman condition is to reduce all
to simple perception—but this is a desire which only grace makes truly realizable, in the
transluminous night of contemplation. Descartes, for his part, set himself to that from the first,
and in the very work of the reason. He wanted to effect such a concentration of evidence that the
whole train of conclusions might be grasped by simple intuition of the principle: that alone is
worthy of Science! And as he could not manage that, he would despair and confess himself
beaten by the evil Genius, did he not think that, in the initial certitudes of the cogito and the
ontological proof, he had found an argument as ready and direct as simple intuitive perception.
He would despair, did he not also think that by making the thought of God and the divine
truthfulness coexistent and coextensive with the whole advance of knowledge, and by setting the
philosopher in the ever-present light of the idea of God,16 he could remedy the impossibility in
which we are (and to which he will never submit), of having, at the actual moment when we
make the inference, gathered up in one single and indivisible present (in which memory has
nothing to do) the present—and compelling— evidence of all the previously established
conclusions which serve us as premisses.

“What does this mean, but that the sole authentic and legitimate archetype of Knowledge
is, for him, angelic Knowledge? The angel neither reasons, nor proceeds by reasoning: he has but
one intellectual act, which is at once perceiving and judging: he sees consequences not
successively from the principle, but immediately in the principle; he is not subject to the
progressive actualization of knowledge which constitutes logical movement properly so called; if
his thought travels, it is by intuitive leaps, from perfect act to perfect act, from intelligible
fullness to intelligible fullness, according to the discontinuity of wholly spiritual time, which is

16
We know that for Descartes an atheist has not the certain knowledge of any truth, for his best established
conclusions can always be rendered doubtful by the hypothesis of the evil Genius.
In fact, at the moment when a demonstration makes a conclusion evident to us, we are relying on premisses
which we hold to be true and have been themselves the subject of demonstration, but which are not so evident as to
compel our thought at the time, since at the given moment our act of intellection is not brought to bear on them, but
on the conclusion in connexion with them. We remember having seen them as true, we do not then see them as true.
And as we are not at the time compelled by their obviousness, it is enough for the hypothesis of the evil Genius to
occur to our mind and be accepted by us, for a doubt affecting these propositions to become possible.
Descartes, who does not seem to have explicitly made clear the question of the rightful value of our faculties of
cognition, but to have had chiefly in view to conquer actually the state of doubt (of doubt really practised) which he
himself created by giving rash welcome to the hypothesis of the evil Genius, Descartes sees only one way of
escaping this difficulty. That is, to have recourse to the existence of God and His truthfulness, in order to free
himself from the hypothesis of the evil Genius first of all accepted. For him who knows that existence, the
hypothesis of the evil Genius has henceforth lost all its sting,—the temptation is overcome,—and from then onwards
demonstrated conclusions can no longer be rendered doubtful; that man truly knows.
Such is, we think, the true bearing of Cartesian thought here. Does it, even understood in this way, escape the
objection of the vicious circle? No; for that truth “God exists,’’ is itself a demonstrated conclusion, and when I am
not at the moment under the compelling clearness of the demonstration which establishes it, I am not, in good
Cartesian logic, in such a position as not to be subject in this matter to the uncertainty brought by the hypothesis of
the evil Genius.
To avoid the vicious circle, it would be necessary to make that conclusion an intuition co-existing with the whole
stream of my thought: The ontologism which Descartes would never admit is thus the limit to which Cartesian
metaphysic essentially tends, and the only way it can find its balance.

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not a succession of instants without duration, (like the time, also discontinuous, which Descartes
attributes to our world) but the permanence of a stable instant which lasts motionless so long as it
does not give place to another motionless instant of contemplation. That is the ideal limit, the
pure type of reason conceived in the manner of Descartes.

“The angelic intellect is not made of faked-up intuitions, like the Cartesian
understanding; it is genuinely intuitive. It is true that it is infallible, at least in the natural order,
and that is so necessary a consequence that the fact of error is very troublesome to Cartesian
optimism, the most difficult of humiliations to admit and the most difficult to explain.

“How is it possible that I should be mistaken, I who am spirit? How can a substance
whose whole nature is to think, think wrongly? It is so serious an anomaly that the author of
things seems compromised by the scandal. I am mistaken only because I will have it so, my free
will alone is to blame. And therefore human error is explained for Descartes in the same way as
theologians explain angelic error; I mean, more precisely, than the Cartesian theory of error, so
little consistent with his position, would only become coherent and logical if one brought to it,
with suitable emendation, the case of the errors of fallen spirits. Precipitancy of judgement!
When they err (which only happens to them when they are dealing with the supernatural order),
they see in full light an object whose natural reality they completely apprehend, and they also see
not less clearly the contingent and conjectural bond between that object and any other—for
example, some future event—which remains dark to them. And when they impetuously extend
their affirmation beyond what they see, and give their assent precipitately, I mean by deliberate
inadvertence, to a thing which is not evident to them, it is because they are carried away by the
malice of their will: ‘sciens et volens non se detinet, sed judicat ultra quam potest.’17 Such,
according to Descartes, is man when he affirms andjudges beyond what he perceives clearly and
distinctly, from a weakness of his free will, from an impetuosity for which his will is solely
responsible, and that just in so far as it is free. Due allowance being made, we cannot help
remarking here a strange likeness between this psychology of error in the fallen Angel and the
psychology of error in us according to Descartes.

“In consequence of this angelist psychology the philosopher will demand such a criterion
of certitude that to avoid error it shall be enough for us at every moment to survey the field of
our representations with a true will not to be deceived. To look into ourselves, to separate the
obscure from the clear, and the confused from the distinct, and agree only to the clear and
distinct, so that it shall rest as much and as rightly with our will that we should not err in
speculation as that we should not sin in action: that is the art of infallibility which the criterion of
clear ideas should teach us.18 Obviously such a science ought to be constructible—under ideal
conditions, instantaneously—at the worst easily and quickly: the greater the speed, and the fewer
the minds concerned with its construction, the better. Was not one enough for it? If he were in a
position to make all the experiments he needs, would not Descartes himself refound and
complete the whole body of wisdom? He has no time to lose, he is a man in a hurry (like all
moderns). If he can only snatch some tens of years from death, the great work on which the

17
John of St. Thomas: Curs. theol., q. 58, disp. 22, a. 4, n. xxii (Vivès, IV, p. 860).
18
“To reach truth,” said Malebranche, “it is enough to make oneself attentive to the clear ideas which each finds in
himself.”(Rech. de la vérité, I, 1). Taine: Ancien Régime, III, 2 quotes this saying as characteristic of the classical
spirit, – let us call it more exactly the Cartesian spirit.

8
happiness and perfection of humanity depend will be done. In any case it will not need more than
two or three centuries—this we now have the pleasure of verifying.

“If Cartesianism showed itself so savage a ravager of the past in the intelligible order, it
is because it began by disowning in the individual himself the essential intrinsic dependence of
our present knowledge on our past, which makes our establishment in truth, humanly speaking,
necessarily and of itself a strangely long and laborious thing. In a general manner, whether the
poor effort of the individual or the common work of generations is in question, the Cartesian
angel only submits to time as to an external compulsion, a force repugnant to his nature; he does
not understand the essential function of time in bringing human cognition to maturity.

“The ideas of the angel, as we have said, are innate: they do not come from objects, like
our abstract ideas; they are infused into him, received at the beginning like a dowry of light.
They are certainly accidents, really distinct from the angelic substance and its intellective power,
and superadded gifts, but they are required as of right by the nature of the pure spirit.

“From the fact that Descartes refuses to acknowledge the reality of accidents distinct
from substance his innatism remains bound in inextricable difficulties. Sometimes innate ideas
are proximate dispositions to think this or that, yet still confused with the thinking nature itself,
which puts in the latter, as it were, hidden preformations which already foreshadow the
Leibnizian virtualities. Sometimes the soul differs from its thoughts as extension from its shapes,
and for Descartes, (who, by one of his frequent clumsinesses, here wrongly applies the scholastic
notion of mode,) that means that the act of thinking this or that is not an accidental but a
substantial determination, a completion of the thinking substance in its very substantiality. As if
an operation could be substantial elsewhere than in the Pure Act! He thus pictures mode as a
substantial completion in the operative order. Spinoza took this bastard notion and made a pretty
monster of it.

“It remains—and this is what concerns us—that the Cartesian ideas come from God, like
angelic ideas, not from objects. Thus the human soul is not only subsistent as the ancients taught,
causing the body to exist with its own existence; it has, without the body, received direct from
God all the operative perfection which can befit it. There is the destruction of the very reason of
its union with the body, or rather, there is its inversion. For if the body and the senses are not the
necessary means of the acquisition of its ideas for that soul, and consequently the instrument by
which it rises to its own perfection, which is the life of the intelligence and the contemplation of
truth, then, as the body must be for the soul and not the soul for the body, the body and senses
can be there for nothing but to provide the soul —which needs only itself and God in order to
think, —with means for the practical subjugation of the earth and all material nature, and this
reduces the soul’s good to the domination of the physical universe. This universe, the whole of
which has not the value of one spirit, will make it pay dear for this deordination. This angel is
iron-gloved, and extends its sovereign action over the corporeal world by the innumerable arms
of Machinery! Poor angel turning the grindstone, enslaved to the law of matter, and soon fainting
under the terrible wheels of the elemental machine which has got out of order.

“But to come back to the Cartesian theory of Knowledge. If our cognition is like an
outflow of the creative truth into our spirit, if wisdom, of which we bear all the innate germs in

9
the nature of our soul, is a pure unfolding of our understanding, human science must be one, with
the oneness of the understanding ; there can be no specific diversity of sciences. And thus there
will be no specific diversity of knowledge ruling the judgement, no varying degrees of certitude.
Certainly it is so with the angel, for all his certitudes in the natural order are unique in degree, —
even the degree of perfection of his own immateriality and his innate knowledge. In Descartes
the result is the most radical levelling of the things of the spirit: one same single type of
certitude, rigid as Law, is imposed on thought; everything which cannot be brought under it
mustberejected; absolute exclusion ofeverything that is not mathematically evident, or deemed
so. Itis inhuman cognition, because it would be superhuman! There is the source not only of
Descartes’ proclamation of brutal contempt for the humanities, for Greek and Latin: ‘It is no
more the duty of a sound man to know Greek or Latin than to know Swiss or Low-Breton,’ —for
history, for erudition, for all the huge realm of positive and moral studies which his successors
later reduced to absurdity in the desire to make of them a ‘mathematics of the contingent’; but it
is the principle and the origin of the deep inhumanity of our modern science.

“Moreover, innatism, making of the intellect a power predetermined by nature to all the
objects of its knowledge, does not allow that our understanding should be intrinsically
determined and raised as by a grafting in it of the object to be known or the end to be attained, in
order to produce a perfect work wherever it be, whether in the speculative or practical order. No
more than with the angel in the natural order, are there elevating qualities or habitus in the
Cartesian intellect.

“Hamelin noticed rightly that one of the causes of the passion for method in the time of
Descartes—at that time when modern man, the better to start his attack on the world, left the old
supports of intellectual tradition—was the need to justify so much confidence by replacing these
supports by a good insurance against error. To tell the truth, what the guaranteed success of the
process and the recipe had to do duty for was not only the aids ofthe via disciplinae, but also and
especially the interior vigour of the habitus. And thus common sense will do for everything. The
shop of clear ideas is the Bon Marché of wisdom. After Descartes, prices will go up again, and
that fine universal facility will give way to the most fearful complications. But it is always by
method, or by methods, and no longer by the spiritual quality ennobling the intellect, that the
austerity of knowledge will be measured. We see in our days the cheering effects of this
materialization of science, and the astonishing intellectual beggary that an advance, admirable in
itself, in technical specialization and operative processes can bring about: for the flame remains
feeble on which piles of green wood are flung.

“The deepest quality of angelic cognition is not that it is intuitive or innate, but that it is
independent of external objects. The ideas of pure spirits have no proportion with ours. As they
are resolved in the very truth of God and not in the truth of external objects, these infused ideas
are a created likeness, and as it were a refraction, in the angelic intellect of the divine ideas and
the uncreated light where all is life. So that they represent things just in so far as things derive
from the divine ideas, for the angels have thus received, at the first instant, the seal of likeness
which made them full of wisdom and perfect in beauty — tu signaculum similitudinis, plenus
sapientia et perfectus decore19 —and God, as St. Augustine says, produced things intelligibly in
the knowledge of spirits before producing them really in their own being.
19
Ezech., xxviii, 12.

10
 “Moreover, these ideas, unlike our abstract ideas, are universal not by the object which
they present to the intelligence immediately, but only by the means which they constitute of
reaching from the same point of view a multitude of natures and individuals distinctly
apprehended even to their ultimate differences. Their universality is not the universality of
representation due to the process of abstraction, but the universality of causation or activity
belonging to the creative ideas, whence things descend into being, and of which the angel’s ideas
are a likeness cut to his measure. They are, John of St. Thomas tells us, like copies of models —
but sparkling with spiritual vitality —like models imprinted on the angelic intellect, in which is
figured the countless swarm of creatures flowing from the supreme art, as God sees it even
before bringing it into existence: though doubtless not in the absolute unity of the divine vision,
but distributed according to the capacity of created spirits, under certain great categories, by the
unity of objects in their relation to such or such an end, and in the mode in which they proceed
from their divine exemplars. And so, like the divine causality and the divine ideas, the ideas of
the angel go down to existence itself: they directly touch the individual existence,
comprehensively known by pure intelligences so far as it receives being and responds, in the
concrete of matter then given, to its eternal archetype refracted in the pure spirit.

“It is thus that the angelic cognition, depending solely on the knowledge of God, is
independent of objects, from which it does not draw its ideas, and which are not its formal rule—
independent, we may say, if at least we are talking of the lower world, in regard to its very
objects of intellection, which it precedes, which it awaits, of which it is the measure, which it
fully apprehends by the very efficacy of the creative knowledge, and to the intelligibility of
which it has not to proportion the degree of immateriality of its ideas. We see in what eminent
sense the angel knows all the things of this lower world a priori and by their supreme causes,
since he knows them by a participation in the very ideas which make them, since he knows the
work of art—I mean all this universe—in what the artist tells him about his operative science, the
very cause of being and all beauty.

“Now look at the Cartesian understanding. Does not that also hang immediately on God,
rising above and measuring all material nature without receiving anything from it? By one of
those slips due to his resolve to go quickly in the work, Descartes applies to the certitudes of
reason and science the classical solutions of the traditional teaching about the formal motive of
faith: veritas prima revelans, the authority of God revealing. It is because God cannot lie that
clear and distinct ideas deserve our assent, and he who does not know the divine truthfulness is
strictly certain of nothing. If we could not lean on the guarantee of the truthfulness of the
Creator, author of things and author of our mind, we could not know on trustworthy authority
that there is a material world, or that there exist outside our thought things in conformity with our
ideas, or even that these ideas deliver to us anything of the authentic, intelligible object or of the
eternal truths, and do not deceive us even in what we conceive as most evident. That well shows
that rational cognition is for Descartes a sort of natural revelation,20 that our ideas, like the
infused species of the angel, have their immediate pattern in God, not in objects.

“Yet, surely, unlike the angelic intellect, the Cartesian understanding reaches directly
neither individuality nor existence. Be undeceived. However ill or hastily Descartes may have
expressed himself on general ideas, it seems clear that in his eyes they are essentially incomplete
20
Cf. Bordas-Demoulin: Le Cartésianisme, I, 29; Hamelin, op. cit., 233.

11
notions—Spinoza later called them inadequate. Human science, if it is to be perfect, must reach
singular essences by direct apprehension. A universal means of thinking, in the angelic fashion,
all well and good! A universal object of thought, an abstract quiddity whose singular mode of
realization we know only by a return to images, that is not worthy of the spirit to which all matter
is subjected. Hardly indicated in Descartes, that disregard of nature and of the importance of the
universal in praedicando—of the properly human universal—that sort of intellectualist
nominalism developed fully with Leibnitz and Spinoza; with them it became one of the signs of
the claim to be as the angels which characterizes absolute intellectualism, until, falling into
English heads and rejoining the old sensationalist nominalism, it helped to ruin every sound
notion of abstraction.

“As to the perception of the existent as such, we may say that the transition to existence,
the grasp of existence by the help of the intelligence alone and starting from pure ideas, forms
just the crucial problem of the Cartesian philosophy. For as our ideas are no longer resolved
(materially) in things by means of the senses, whose data have no longer anything but pragmatic
and subjective value, existence and the placing of things outside nothingness is no longer
conveyed to us at once by our fleshly contact with the world. We must arrive at being, we must
rejoin it, or deduce it, or beget it, from an ideal principle set or discovered in the depths of
thought. There is the impossible task to which, from Descartes to Hegel, the metaphysics of the
moderns is condemned. Descartes kept the scholastic teaching that the perception of our human
intelligences reaches directly only essences, and therefore cannot by itself cross the vast sky
which separates the possible from existent reality. For him, meanwhile, pure thought must be
self-sufficient, and the philosophizing intelligence cannot, even in the order of the resolutio
moralis, essentially need to have recourse to the senses, which of themselves yield to us only
modifications of our consciousness, appearances, uncertainty. Must one, then, renounce for ever
any meeting with Being? No. There are privileged cases in which the pure intelligence suffices to
reach it; it is so with the cogito, in which thought transparent to itself knows its own existence
not by an empirical verification, but by an immediate grasp of its substantial ground in an act of
intellection; it is so with the proof of God by the idea, in which thought has only to fix itself on
the imprint of Perfection in it to read there openly Its real existence. It is a twofold intellectual
revelation of existence in which alone human reason reaches its full spiritual measure, and
behaves like the angel knowing himself and his author.

“My thought exists, God exists. All flows from that. It is from God that the Cartesian
science descends to things and deduces Physics. It is perfect science, science by causes, the only
one proportioned to the philosopher’s ambition. It also knows this universe a priori and
according to the very order of creative reasons. (If it fails in the task, it will be to hand it over to
the metaphysics of Spinoza.) Does it expect anything from the senses, for after all one does not
quite forget that one is human? The senses have only an accidental part, in particular that of
selecting between the equally possible different ideal combinations and of showing us which has
actually been realized.

“Such, in its first manifestation, appears to us the independence of the Cartesian reason in
regard to external objects; separation between the intelligence and the senses by which the
intelligence was in continuity with external objects, with the existent singular. Contempt of the
body in the work of science, refusal of animal cognition which first binds us to creation, refusal

12
of that properly human condition of being able to know only by the senses and the intellect
together what the angel knows by intellect alone. See that fine science set out. Is it fairly sure of
itself? It will go far. But Kant is waiting for it at the turn of the road. If the senses, he will say to
it, only yield pure appearances to us and are not to our minds the vehicle of what is, to reach
being you would need, O presumptuous one, a supersensible intuition, even that enjoyed by the
pure spirits in whose image you have been re-formed. But you have no such intuition in your
luggage. Ergo, you will never know that which is, and all your a priori is only a phenomenal
structure.

“There is a second aspect, perhaps more specific, of the independence of the Cartesian
reason with respect to things. This time it is less a question of sensible things as such than of
their intelligibility, and therefore of the proper object of the intelligence.

“For St. Thomas, and it is a logical consequence of the abstractive nature of our
intelligence, the sole absolutely first object reached by it is Being in general, and in that it
resolves all its conceptions, learning at the dictation of experience to make explicit the
differences contained in it. Now it is most evident that Being, which permeates all things, is
hostile to no reality; it welcomes them all, it is the Abraham’s bosom, if I may venture to call it
so, in which rest all the fauna of creation, all the forms which flow from the Poetry of God,
however noble and rare, poor or luxuriant they may be. Hence it follows that an analysis carried
out in terms of Being, elaborating the concepts of our science according to the requirements
ofreality, docile to the analogy oftranscendentals, following with fidelity and obedience, with
tenderness and devotion, the outlines of that which is, will be able to penetrate into things and
put essences into intelligible communication without any injury to their originality, their unity,
their own secret. That is why although the brain of a Thomist may be as limited and hard as
every human brain and very disproportioned to the wisdom he defends, yet none the less he has
the consolation of telling himself that, considering the doctrine in itself, if not the doctor, there is
nothing in heaven and earth which is not at home in his theology.

“For Descartes, on the contrary, and it is a logical consequence of his innatism, thought
finds in itself a plurality of ideas, ready made, irreducible, irresolvable each clear by itself, each
the object of primary intuition, intelligible elements to which everything that knowledge has to
do with must be reduced. These are the ‘simple natures’ which are like atoms of obviousness and
intelligibility. As he suppressed the material resolution of our concepts in external objects,
Descartes suppresses their formal resolution in Being.

“Nor do the angels cut out their ideas from the common cloth of Being, but that is
because they fully apprehend the whole reality of a section of creation by a single one of their
comprehensive ideas. Whereas to replace resolution in being by reduction to simple natures—to
thought, for things of the soul; to extension and motion for things of the body—can only produce
incalculable mischief in an understanding which, however much it may dislike it, remains dis-
cursive, and whose whole work consists in advancing by composition of concepts.

“What the Cartesian revolution introduces here is nothing less than a radical change in
the very notion of intelligibility, and correlatively in the very type of scientific intellection and
‘explanation.’

13
 “Unqualified in principle to comprehend the analogy of being and to use it, and so from
the first closing to itself approach to divine things, the Cartesian analysis, cutting up and
levelling down, can only break the internal unity of beings, destroy alike the originality and
diversity of natures, and violently bring everything back to the univocal elements which it has
been pleased to select as simple principles. Henceforth, to understand is to separate; to be
intelligible is to be capable of mathematical reconstruction. To take a machine to pieces and put
it together again, that is the high work of the intelligence. The mechanical explanation becomes
the only conceivable type of scientific explanation.

“Criterion of obviousness! There is nothing more equivocal and less loyal than the
Cartesian clearness and distinctness. Let us clearly understand that Cartesian obviousness is
wholly difierent from the obviousness designated by the ancients, and by the common usage of
men, as the criterion of certitude. That obviousness is a property of Being, fulgor objecti, and it
manifests itself to our mind in self-evident propositions known of themselves, first principles of
our knowledge. It forces us to difficult elaborations in order to keep these principles faithfully,
yet without in any way disregarding experience, in order to sin neither against reason nor against
reality. The more it makes our science grow, the more it makes us perceive that Being is our
measure and that there is nothing of which we know the whole. Finally, whether it is question of
power, matter, contingency, of what is in itself least intelligible, or of the things of the spirit and
of God—to a sovereign degree intelligible in themselves but to our intellect as the sun to an
owl’s eyes—it leads us to objects dark either in themselves or for us, and makes us issue out on
mystery, mystery of imperfection or perfection. What does it matter? It is a luminous night, in
which the necessities of thought trace for us a surer way than the orbits of the planets.

“Cartesian obviousness, on the contrary, is a subjective obviousness, a quality of certain

ideas, and it is not in the propositions regulating the progression of our certitudes, it is in
notional objects, the term of the analysis of things, that it is manifested to our mind. There are
ideas which are self-evident and perfectly penetrable by our thought. These ideas are the matter
of science. All the others must be reduced to them or be eliminated. These are the things which
lie open to the Cartesian angel. Far from the corporeal world concealing a residue of relative
unintelligibility, it is perfectly clear to our human perception, being nothing but geometrical
extension, perfectly subject to our spirit in cognition before being perfectly subject to it in
practice. With this fatal meeting of pantheism and absolute intellectualism, we soon have,
confronting an intelligence which imagines itself as in pure act of intellection, a universe which
is imagined as in pure act of intelligibility. We really have all things forcibly adjusted to the level
of human ideas, the treasures of experience squandered, creative art profaned, and the work
which God made replaced by the inane world of rationalism.

“To tell the truth, as our reason drifts and has no rule in it when separated from Being,
clear ideas understood in Descartes’ sense furnish no consistent criterion. Actually they are
reduced to ideas which are easy or ‘easy to conceive,’ and the Cartesian clearness is synonymous
with facility. Ought not science, then, to be easy to man as it is to the angel? That is why
Mathematics becomes the Queen of Sciences and the norm of all knowledge. Everywhere else,
under cover of this pretended strictness, the arbitrary creeps in, following a law of irony which
we see daily verified (of which German exegesis gives a good illustration in the nineteenth
century). Bossuet says in a celebrated passage, ‘Under the pretext that we must not accept

14
anything but what we understand clearly—which, within certain limits, is very true— everyone
gives himself liberty to say, ‘I understand this, and I do not understand that,’ and on this sole
basis they admit and reject whatever they like.’21 In practice, for truth measured by Being
Cartesian obviousness could not but substitute facility in reasoning and tractability of ideas. The
Philosophy of Illumination, lighting heaven with the candles of the Encyclopaedia, will thus very
naturally continue the philosophy of clear ideas.

“Let us say that, in all that, the Cartesian understanding claims independence with respect
to its object, with respect not only to things as the object of the senses, but to things as the object
of science. Descartes is an out-and-out dogmatist, and from this point of view the very opposite
of a subjectivist. But with him human science, drunk with mathematics, begins no longer to be
measured by the object. For its constitution, its existence as a science, it no longer asks the object
to impose its law upon it, it imposes on the object a measure and a rule which it thinks it finds in
itself. Thus while the science of the Angel, although independent of external objects, does not
deform the object which it reaches, because it reaches it by a likeness of the creative ideas, cause
and measure of that object and of its being, the Cartesian science does violence to reality in order
to reduce it to the predestined scale of ‘scientific’ explanations. Thenceforward the human
intelligence becomes the law-giver in speculative matters; it fashions its object. We may say that
Cartesian reason practised Kantian apriorism before it was named (in actu exercito). Kant
afterwards only had to observe that in good logic an understanding which fashions its objects
without producing them in being can only have phenomena for its objects and not things in
themselves, Cartesian dogmatism, after a long flight, will have become agnosticism when it falls
to earth.

“The Angel knows himself immediately by his substance, in a perfect intuition which
yields him the ground of his being. His natural cognizance of God is consummated not only in
his beholding external objects, but primarily and above all in beholding himself, in the most pure
mirror of his own essence. His own essence is the first object of his intellection, and he is always
in act of intellection of himself. Everything he knows, he knows by first being cognizant of
himself and by a sort of prolongation of his cognizance of himself.

“All that appears again, transposed and lessened, in Cartesian thought. But why is the
soul easier to know than the body? Why does everything it knows reveal first its own nature to
it? Not because its essence is the transparent object through which it sees all things, but because
its glance stops at itself, ends in an idea which is something of itself, congeals in self-
consciousness. My act of apprehension, as such, only grasps my thought, or a representation, an
effigy depicted in it, with which, by reason of the divine truthfulness, some outward model
corresponds. The idea thus becomes the sole term immediately attained by thought, the thing,
portrait or representation, itself first known before making anything else known. This reification
of ideas, this confusion of the idea with an ‘instrumental sign’ and an ‘object quod’ is, as we
have shown elsewhere, the original sin of modern philosophy.22 It governs all the Cartesian
doctrine of knowledge, the Cartesian first proof of the existence of God, the Cartesian theory of
eternal truths; without it, Descartes as a philosopher is unintelligible.

21
Letter to the Marquis d’Allemans, 21st May, 1687 (Urbain et Levesque, III, 372-373).
22
Réflexions sur l’Intelligence, chaps. II, III, and IX.

15
 “Now it is curious to note here, yet again, a collusion with the angelic world. The divine
ideas, in the light of which the Angel knows external objects, are creative or operative ideas, an
artist’s ideas: models in imitation of which a thing is made (forma intelligibilis ad quam
respiciens artifex operatur). The object seen in such an idea is not a nature drawn from external
objects and transported into the knowing spirit, it is a model issuing from the creating spirit,
according to which the thing is placed in being. Confuse these ideas of the divine art with the
concepts of human knowledge, and for both it will mean going from the idea to the object, from
thought to being, and you will have made of the object immediately grasped in the concept
something different from what is: —a model, a picture of what is. You will thus have come back
to the Cartesian ideas and the principle of all modern idealism.

“With this theory of representational ideas the claims of Cartesian reason to

independence of external objects reach their highest point: thought breaks with Being. It forms a
sealed world which is no longer in contact with anything but itself; its ideas, now opaque effigies
interposed between it and external objects, are still for Descartes a sort of lining of the real
world. But as Hamelin says, the lining was to consume the cloth. Here again Kant finishes
Descartes’ work. If the intelligence when it thinks, reaches immediately only its own thought, or
its representations, the thing hidden behind these representations remains for ever unknowable.

“The retreat of the human mind on itself, independence of the reason with respect to the
sensible origin of our ideas, to the object as the rule of our science, to real natures as the
immediate term of our intellection —absolute intellectualism, mathematicism, idealism — and,
finally, irremediable breach between intelligence and Being—that, then, is how Descartes
revealed Thought to itself.

“The result of a usurpation of the angelic privileges, that denaturing of human reason
driven beyond the limits of its species, that lust for pure spirituality, could only go to the infinite:
passing beyond the world of created spirits it had to lead us to claim for our intelligence the
perfect autonomy and the perfect immanence, the absolute independence, the aseity of the
uncreated intelligence.23 Of that claim, Kant was the scholastic formulator, but the origins lie
much deeper: and though the world’s experience has already been wretched enough and
humiliating enough to give it the lie, it remains the secret principle of the break-up of our culture
and of the disease of which the apostate West seems determined to die.

“The old philosophy knew the nobility of the intelligence and the sublime nature of
thought. It knew that in its purity, and freed from every condition alien to its formal notion, it is
only fully realized in the infinitely holy God. It knew that if the human intelligence is the last of
the intelligences, it yet partakes of the life and liberty which belong to the spirit; that if it
depends on the senses, it is to draw from them wherewith to transcend the whole sensible
universe; that if it depends on the object to which it is proportioned, it is to gush out in
spontaneous action and become all things; that if it depends on the being which makes it fruitful,
it is to conquer Being itself and rest only in it. You pay dear for rejecting these truths.

23
It is not without interest to note that, from a very different point of view, Hamelin also observed that Cartesian
innateness “is the independence, the aseity, the sufficiency of thought.”(Op. cit. p. 176).

16
 “That which is the measure has, as such, that which is measured under its complete rule,
imposes its specification upon it, holds it bound and subject. Because it no longer understands
the life which belongs to it as a created spirit, which interiorizes within itself what is its measure
and finds its true liberty in that subjection, and because it wants an absolute and undetermined
liberty for itself, it is natural that human thought, since Descartes, refuses to be measured
objectively or to submit to intelligible necessities. Freedom with respect to the objective is the
mother and nurse of all modern freedoms; it is the finest achievement of Progress, which makes
us, as we are no longer measured by anything, subject to anything whatever! Intellectual liberty
which Chesterton compared to that of the turnip (and that is a libel on the turnip), and which
strictly only belongs to primal matter.

“Thus the Cartesian reformation is not only at the source of the torrent of illusions and
fables which self-styled ‘immediate clarities’ have poured on us for two centuries and a half; it
has a heavy weight of responsibility for the immense futility of the modern world and that
strange condition in which we see humanity today, as powerful over matter, as informed and
cunning to rule the physical universe, as it is weakened and lost in face of the intelligible realities
of which the humility of a wisdom subject to Being once made it partaker. To fight against
bodies it is equipped like a god; to fight against spirits it has lost all its weapons, and the pitiless
laws of the metaphysical universe crush it in mockery.”24

“Con Descartes, la gnoseologia non è più una riflessione metafisica sul fatto della
conoscenza delle cose: la conoscenza non ha più come oggetto l’essere delle cose ma le ‘idee.’”25
Sanguineti writes in his Logic and Gnoseology: “The originality of Descartes is to make of
thought the point of departure of philosophy, be it subjective (the cogito as act) or objective (the
clear idea). In Cartesian philosophy objective thought seems to dominate, which is a new version
of the objective concept of the Scholastics. That which is accepted as real is the clear idea, the
transparency to the spirit of the present object, removed from every imaginative or sensible
element. The idea is that which is known: afterwards, we have to see whether behind this there is
a reality, which will be the cause of the idea. In this way a fracture is produced between idea and
reality, since the object is not reality, but the latter’s representation.26 Descartes is still a realist,
but a mediate realist: one needs to conquer reality with deduction; yet, we do not know how we
could truly conceive it, given that we do not conceive anything other than ideas.

“Therefore, things are not intelligible in themselves, and in reality they are lost, because
we only arrive at a thought reality. God, affirms Descartes, ‘not having given me any faculty to
know what they may be, but on the contrary a very large propensity to believe that the ideas are
sent to me, or come from corporeal things, I do not see how one could excuse him from
deception, if those ideas were not to proceed from corporeal things. And thus it must be
concluded that corporeal things exist,’27 albeit recognizing that these reasons are not as firm and
evident as those that lead to the knowledge of God and of our soul. We may agree with Gilson:
‘either one works from being in a realistic way, and then one will have knowledge, or rather one

24
J. MARITAIN, Three Reformers: Luther, Descartes, Rousseau, Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1929, pp. 54-
81.
25
A. LIVI, La ricerca della verità, Ed. Leonardo da Vinci, Rome, 2005, p. 47.
26
Cf. L. POLO, Evidencia y realidad en Descartes, Rialp, Madrid, 1963.
27
R. DESCARTES, Medit., 6.

17
works from knowledge in the mode of critical idealism, and then one will never reach
being.’28”29

For Descartes, “all that we know immediately, directly, and without need of
demonstration is our own ideas. This is the subjectivistic postulate…Descartes started with his
ideas and reasoned to other things, and particularly to the reality of material things...The Wrong
Starting Point. With his ‘I think’ as starting point for an inquiry into knowledge, Descartes
started modern philosophy down the road that led inevitably to idealism. The starting point, pure
thought, effectively excluded external, non-mental beings from the inquiry right from the start.
Every inquiry must begin from something which is evident in itself, and must constantly refer
back to this self-evident, just as an army advancing must maintain constant communication with
its supply depot. No matter how far the inquiry progresses, it gets its whole force only from the
immediate evidents from which it starts. An evident which is entirely subjective, that, within the
mind, can never give to an inquiry starting from it the force to get beyond the mind.
Consequently, modern philosophy, taking its signal from Descartes, was doomed to end in
illusion. Hence, we find repeated, in some form or other, by nearly every major modern
philosopher the dictum of Descartes, that all we know immediately and directly are our own
ideas. Some, like Descartes himself, tried to show ways in which, from this direct knowledge of
our own ideas, we can and do attain certain, though indirect, knowledge of other things. But their
attempts are all failures.”30

Descartes is the father of modern idealism. In his The Dream of Descartes, Maritain
writes: “If it is the question of the connection between thought and being, I shall simply recall (in
order not to become involved in discussions to too-technical a nature) – that for the Scholastics
we communicate with things first by means of the senses which attain the thing itself existing
outside of us, not in its intimate nature but in its action upon us; and then by means of the
intellect and of ideas – ideas which are drawn actively from the senses by the mind, and which
are essentially immaterial means, living and vital relations by which we get at what things are, at
their natures.

“Thus, whereas divine knowledge precedes things and measures them, since it makes
them, our known knowledge is measured by things; and the least thing, the tiniest grain of wheat
is a resisting, consisting, subsisting reality, the intelligibility of which we shall never have ceased
to drain.

“For Descartes, on the contrary, the senses have no knowledge value; they have only a
pragmatic value. And ideas are not only means, they are already things; it is as things that they
are attained by thought (now conceived only as self-consciousness) – as if they were pictures
which it discovers in itself. Locke’s formula: ideas are the immediate objects of thought, is a
pure Cartesian formula. Idea-pictures, idea-screens. In short, we know only our ideas; thought
has direct contact only with itself.

28
É. GILSON, Réalisme thomiste et critique de la connaissance, Vrin, Paris, 1947, p. 156.
29
J. J. SANGUINETI, Logic and Gnoseology, Urbaniana University Press, Rome, 1987, pp. 155-156.
30
BENIGNUS, Nature, Knowledge, and God, Bruce, Milwaukee, 1947, pp. 293, 300.

18
 “Descartes, no doubt, does not stop there. He still believes in things, he wants to know
them. You know to what device he has recourse in order to justify that knowledge. Cogito, my
thought seizes upon itself and grasps its own existence. In this thought there is the idea of God;
from the idea of God I conclude that God exists: God existing and being veridical, the clear and
distinct ideas which I find in me, like innate pictures and like objects immediately attained by my
thought, these idea-pictures are good; back of them are models, doubles, which are things. Thus I
am certain that this table exists, and I am sure of the truth of the propositions that I can set forth
on the subject because, first of all, I am sure of my thought and sure of the existence of God,
through Whom I must pass in order to be sure of anything; and Who is the Guarantor of my
science, of the Science.

“There you have the Cartesian circuit. Modern philosophy will not be long in pulling it to
pieces – from that point of view it is like the primitives according to Freud; it has killed and
eaten its father, it has devoured Descartes. It is clear, for example, that the whole system remains
in the air, because one simply does not demonstrate the existence of God by starting with the sole
idea of God.

“What is left then, is not the Cartesian system, it is the Cartesian conception of thought
and ideas. Whether one believes in the existence of things as Descartes himself believed (thanks
to the circuit in question), or as Spinoza did (to the extent that he was a realist) in saying that
there is a parallelism between the thing and the idea, and that the order and the connection of
ideas are identical to the order and connection of things, the fact remains that the modern
conception of knowledge itself is from the very outset idealistic.

“Thought directly attains only itself; it is not ruled by things, but by its own internal
exigencies; it does not depend on things but on itself alone. A world shut up, absolute – by itself
alone it develops science within itself, without measuring its strength against any extraneous
resistance. There it is, a human knowledge like divine knowledge, a knowledge which depends
only upon itself. When the later modern idealists, Kant and his successors, make their
appearance, they will make the Cartesian root produce its natural fruit.

“What is the cultural significance of idealism? It carries along with it a sort of

anthropocentric optimism of thought. Optimism, because thought is a god who unfolds itself, and
because things either conform to it, or do not even exist apart from it. What drama could
possibily occur? Either there is no being to set off against thought, or there is only being
completely docile to thought. An optimism which is anthropocentric, because the thought in
question is the thought of man; it is around human thought that objects revolve. All is well for
that thought; and all will be better and better.

“But this optimism is, if I may say so, committed to suicide; for it presupposes a rupture
with being, and finally, in spite of Descartes’ personal intentions and in spite of the efforts of his
immediate successors, it supposes an eviction of the ontological. There we have the great,
primordial Cartesian break. Man shut up within himself is condemned to sterility, because his
thought lives and is nourished only upon the things that God has made. Man the centre of an
intelligible universe which he has created in his own image, himself loses his centre of gravity

19
and his own consistence, for his consistence is to be the image of God. He is in the middle of a
desert.”31

Answer to Descartes on the Criterion of Truth: Metaphysical Realism: Sanguineti on

Evidence: “L’evidenza, criterio fondamentale di verità. Accettiamo la validità delle proposizioni
che intendono parlare della realtà perché ci sembrano vere, o almeno verosimili, vicine alla verità
(accettiamo il valore di altre frasi a seconda del tipo di atto linguistico in esse implicato, ad
esempio, comandi, poesia, finzione: in questi casi, le accettiamo in quanto espressioni buone,
belle, utili). Però, come sappiamo se una proposizione è vera? Per alcuni, dal momento che non
possiamo uscire dalla nostra conoscenza per «andare alla realtà esterna lì fuori», il criterio di
verità sarebbe immanente al pensiero stesso, come la coerenza interna. Si dimentica che la
conoscenza sin dall’inizio sta nella realtà, per cui il problema menzionato è male impostato.

“Non si parte originariamente da proposizioni teoriche e descrittive, per esaminare poi la

verità. La nostra conoscenza inizia e si mantiene di continuo nella notizia abituale e immediata
dell’essere del mondo e della nostra esistenza. La verità dei primi principi non ci abbandona mai.
Solo dopo, nell’esercizio concreto delle operazioni intelletive, abbiamo le prime esperienze
dell’errore, che ci fanno riflettere. Ci accorgiamo così di poter essere ingannati dalle apparenze
percettive, dalle mediazioni razionali o dai giudizi della gente. Di conseguenza, cerchiamo criteri
universali che ci consentano di discernere tra la verità e l’errore. Ci possono essere tanti criteri di
verità, di vario tipo, dotati di maggiore or minore forza. Cercheremo di indicarli quasi tutti.
Tenendo conto della natura dei nostri atti conoscitivi, e seguendo la tradizione filosofica,
sosteniamo innanzitutto l’esistenza di un criterio fondamentale di verità, intrinseco all’atto
conoscitivo: la manifestazione della realtà conosciuta al conoscente o evidenza. Spieghiamo
questi punti.

“Il criterio fondamentale di verità dev’essere oggettivo, personale e universale:

“1) Oggettivo vuol dire che deve corrispondere all’oggetto conosciuto. Non servono
criteri puramente soggettivi di verità: persuasione intima, piacere, sicurezza, intuizioni
particolari, emozioni, «fiuto» personale. «Ho il presentimento che questo sia vero» forse sarà una
situazione psicologica positiva, che favorisce l’incontro con la verità, ma non è un criterio
oggettivo di verità. «Questo mi piace» non significa che sia vero.

“Ciò non significa che i sentimenti e le emozioni non contino nella conoscenza della
verità. Al contrario, la situazione della soggettività è collegata alla percezione della verità,
specialmente quando si tratta di verità morali e antropologiche o l’esistenza di Dio. L’assenso a
una verità percepita è naturale e quindi si sente ripugnanza a non darlo. Ogni uomo prova una
certa inquietudine e tristezza di fronte alla negazione dei principi morali, ad esempio se vede una
persona maltrattata, e sente i rimproveri della sua coscienza quando compie un’ingiustizia. La
violenza contro la persona ha in sé una particolare bruttezza. Quindi nella conoscenza della
verità interviene anche la dimensione estetica. Ciò è dovuto all’esistenza di inclinazioni naturali
verso il bene, la verità e il bello. Il disagio interiore che si prova quando queste inclinazioni sono
contrariate è un fortissimo segno della verità corrispondenti agli oggetti di tali inclinazioni.

31
J. MARITAIN, The Dream of Descartes, Philosophical Library, New York, 1944, pp. 169-172.

20
Questa struttura antropologica è una legittima base per l’elaborazione di argomenti o di
presentazioni estetiche che favoriscono l’emergere di certe evidenze nel cuore dell’uomo.

“2) Personale, nel senso che richiede l’impegno di compiere certe operazioni intellettuali,
talvolta in particolari condizioni e non senza sforzo. I criteri non possono essere puramente
esterni o meccanici, come l’accettazione passiva di un’autorità, la verifica sensibile automatica o
le procedure algoritmiche. Non esiste la «macchina della verità». Nessun dato esterno serve se il
soggetto non vuole vedere né capire (volendo, qualsiasi dato potrà essere interpretato in mille
modi).

“3) Universale, almeno potenzialmente, dato che la verità è universale e accessibile a tutti
gli uomini. Se una persona pensa di essere in possesso di un suo particolare criterio di verità (il
suo acume intellettuale, una fonte riservata di conoscenza), la potrà comunicare soltanto
chiedendo di essere creduta. L’universalità potrebbe ugualmente chiamarsi intersoggettività (il
termine è usato nelle scienze sperimentali in relazione ad esperienze scientifiche ripetibili e alla
portata di tutti).

“Il primo e fondamentale criterio di verità e l’evidenza o immediatezza con cui la cosa
conosciuta si presenta alla nostra potenza intellettiva. Spesso giudichiamo in un determinato
modo perché con la nostra intelligenza afferriamo immediatamente una realtà o un vincolo
intelligibile. Una volta che abbiamo visto con le luci del nostro intelletto tale realtà, elaboriamo
una proposizione cui dare l’assenso. Vediamo che si apre una porta e affermiamo «questa porta si
apre». Il processo può essere inverso. Sentiamo la frase «ecco un giornale!» e ne confermiamo la
verità perché vediamo qualcuno che ci offre un giornale.

“Di solito si distinguono due tipi di evidenza:

“a) Evidenza immediata, legata alla percezione o esperienza diretta di una realtà capita.
Vedo la mia mano, vedo persone accanto a me, percepisco i miei stati d’animo. Oggi si tende a
parlare di auto-evidenza delle proposizioni che esprimono cose immediatamente evidenti.
«Adesso sto scrivendo» è auto-evidente per chi scrive.

“b) Evidenza mediata, nata da un ragionamento che parte da evidenze immediate: ad

esempio, una persona si accorge di non avere soldi e quindi capisce, per implicazione, che non
potrà fare certe spese.

“L’evidenza mediata si riduce all’immediatezza cognitiva. I motivi razionali di una tesi

risalgono a premesse che non possono andare all’infinito, né cadere nella circolarità. Le prime
premesse di una catena di inferenze potranno essere dunque o ipotetiche o evidenti. Tramite il
ragionamento, l’ovvietà si trasmette alle conclusioni. Perfino i vincoli razionali tra una serie di
proposizioni vanno intuiti. Il ragionamento non afferra l’inferenza in modo cieco e automatico.
Tra le frasi «egli non sa il russo» e «questa lettera è scritta in russo», la mente intuisce un legame
razionale (capisce subito: «egli non potrà leggere questa lettera»). Ci affidiamo a metodi
algoritmici di calcolo, ad esempio seguendo ciecamente le regole di somma e sottrazione, senza
alcuna visione «eidetica», perché abbiamo fiducia in tali procedimenti. In quel momento non

21
conosciamo tramite l’evidenza, ma per fede. Eseguire un calcolo automatico non è compiere un
ragionamento.

“I filosofi moderni e contemporanei hanno oscillato tra una sorta di «inflazione»

dell’evidenza, un’evidenza razionalistica che nasce dal desiderio di certezza assoluta, provocato
dal criticismo e dallo scetticismo, e l’abbandono successivo della tematica dell’evidenza,
relegata a un intuizionismo soggettivo poco affidabile. Ma se l’evidenza è espulsa dalla filosofia,
il primato corrisponderà alla ratio, cioè al costruttivismo e alle articolazioni razionali basate
unicamente su congetture o atti di fede, cosa che in fondo nasconde scetticismo e avvia verso il
relativismo. La scomparsa dell’evidenza è spesso collegata alla perdita della nozione di verità
realistica. Popper, in questo senso, ritiene che non partiamo da evidenze, ma da teorie ereditate
dal passato, teorie che saranno al massimo verosimili, se resistono a tutte le critiche.32

“Ma cerchiamo di approfondire la tematica indicando alcune caratteristiche

dell’evidenza:

“1. L’evidenza è la qualità per cui una realtà si manifesta direttamente a un conoscente.
Il termine deriva dal senso della vista e quindi allude alla visibilità, che sul piano intellettuale è
l’intelligibilità o l’immediata comprensibilità di un principio, di una cosa o di un evento. «Si dice
che si vedono le cose che per se stesse muovono il nostro intelletto o i nostri sensi alla
conoscenza».33 L’evidenza è oggettiva e nel contempo è personale, o forse è più esatto dire che
la sua oggettività include il rapporto con un soggetto che può vedere.

“2. Il fondamento oggettivo dell’evidenza è l’essere stesso, talvolta paragonato alla luce
che si mostra per se stessa a chi ha degli occhi. La manifestazione o il disvelamento della realtà è
una tematica cara alla fenomenologia e ad Heidegger. Ma il «mostrarsi fenomenologico» di
Husserl corrisponde piuttosto all’oggetto puro, mentre l’evidenza realistica di cui pariliamo e
innanzitutto un’evidenza esistenziale, collegata alla verità come adeguamento alla realtà
extramentale. L’evidenza realistica è quella per cui la persona che mi parla si rende manifesta
alla mia visione. Se la testimonianza di fede rimanda a una realtà non vista, nell’evidenza la
realtà si presenta per se stessa, cioè dà testimonianza di se stessa.

“3. L’evidenza non è il semplice capire. Possiamo capire la frase «ci sono altri esseri
intelligenti nel cosmo», eppure non lo vediamo. Vedere e sapere sono verbi cognitivi che
implicano la conoscenza della verità. Chi vede conosce, cioè coglie una realtà con la sua
intelligenza: «ti vedo, vedo le tue intenzioni, i tuoi problemi».

“4. L’evidenza ci cui parliamo non si confonde con l’idea chiara e distinta cartesiana.
Parliamo della manifestazione o trasparenza di una realtà al nostro sguardo conoscitivo, non
della chiarezza di un’idea. Cartesio cercava un tipo speciale di chiarezza nelle idee, per poterle
poi attribuire alla realtà. Partiva quindi dall’immediatezza del pensiero, dopo aver bloccato

32
Cfr. K. POPPER, Congetture e confutazioni, Il Mulino, Bologna, 1972, pp. 11-58.
33
Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 1, a. 4. «La scienza si possiede in base a principi noti per se stessi, quindi visti»:
Summa Theologiae, II-II, q. 1, a. 5. L’Aquinate preferisce parlare di conoscenza immediata o di proposizioni per se
notae, ma impiega anche il termine evidenza, di provenienza stoica: cfr. Summa Theologiae, II-II, q. 5, a. 2; De
Veritate, q. 14, a. 1, ad 7; q. 14, a. 9.

22
l’immediatezza del mondo. Alcune idee possono essere molto chiare (un’idea numerica o
geometrica, 2+2=4), eppure non attestano una realtà esistenziale. Invece l’albero davanti a me è
palese come una realtà esistente. Chiamiamo dunque evidenti sia le cose che conosciamo in
modo immediato sia le corrispondenti proposizioni («il fiume Tevere esiste» è una proposizione
evidente, sopratutto per i romani).

“5. Molte evidenze sono sufficientemente chiare, per cui comportano la certezza del
giudizio o il pieno assenso alla loro verità. Chi vede il Colosseo, mentre lo vede non ha dubbi
sulla sua natura ed esistenza. Naturalmente si potranno sempre solevare dubbi «artificiali» contro
qualsiasi evidenza («vedo il Colosseo, ma forse è un delirio»). Se li ammettessimo, dovremmo
abbriacciare la posizione di Cartesio. Nel capitolo sulla percezione sensibile abbiamo
argomentato contro questo atteggiamento (cfr. cap. 2, n. 6).

“Possiamo parlare, in questo senso, di evidenze ragionevoli, quelle cioè che non
ammettono dubbi ragionevoli. La maggior parte delle conoscenze che riteniamo ovvie
possiedono questa qualità. In caso contrario, nessun tribunale al mondo potrebbe giungere a
sentenze giuste o ogni verità sarebbe incerta. Ovviamente nei confronti di alcune presunte
evidenze possono sorgere dubbi ragionevoli, e allora la sospensione del giudizio sarà giustificata.
L’esigenza di un’evidenza assoluta e totale per ogni realtà, tale che la sua negazione
comporterebbe contraddizione, è propria del razionalismo.34

“6. Non si richiede che l’oggetto palese sia completamente capito. Ogni evidenza è
circondata da una certa oscurità. «Esiste questo albero di fronte a me» potrà essere indubitabile,
eppure comprendiamo in un modo oscuro il senso dell’esistenza e della natura dell’albero. Le
prime manifestazioni della realtà sono insieme evidenti e cognitivamente imperfette. La filosofia
e le scienze intendono appunto approfondirle.

“7. L’immediatezza della conoscenza evidente non si contrappone alle mediazioni di tipo
genetico-percettivo e concettuale. Impieghiamo tempo per imparare a vedere, a percepire, a
formulare i nostri concetti. Ogni atto di visione intellettiva comporta la mediazione psichica dei
nostri abiti, dei nostri concetti, delle nostre esperienze e della nostra attività neurale. Ma dal
punto di vista epistemico, l’evidenza porta direttamente all’oggetto, senza mediazioni oggettuali,
al contrario di quanto succede nel ragionamento o nella fede.

“8. L’evidenza richiede naturalmente e senza violenza l’assenso del giudizio. L’assenso
deriva dalla volontà che muove l’intelletto a pronunciare il giudizio. Le evidenze
incontrovertibili dei primi principi sono sempre lì, in modo abituale, e non richiedono un
giudizio esplicito. Talvolta però il giudizio è necessario, e allora la volontà deve fare la sua parte.
L’assenso alle evidenze è naturale, non violento. Al contrario, l’opposizione all’evidenza non si
può compiere senza uno sforzo violento. L’uomo, volendo, può sempre rifiutare di ammettere

34
Il criticismo impiega spesso in modo inadeguato il principio di non contraddizione. «Il mondo esiste», nell’ottica
razionalistica, potrebbe essere una frase falsa perché la sua negazione non è contraddittoria (il mondo potrebbe
essere un sogno prodotto da un genio maligno). Con una tale esigenza, risulterà autoevidente soltanto la necessità
assoluta, cioè le tautologie e l’esistenza di Dio, di solito vista, in questa prospettiva, nella linea dell’argomento
ontologico.

23
un’ovvietà, e può anche inventare pretesti e infinite obiezioni contro qualsiasi evidenza, come
fanno gli scettici. Proprio per questo il dubbio cartesiano è eminentemente volontatio.”35

Answer to Descartes on Truth: Metaphysical Realism/Methodical Realism/Moderate

Realism on Truth: Sanguineti: “Adeguamento all’essere: la verità realistica. Secondo
l’Aquinate, la verità è l’adeguamento della mente alla realtà (adaequatio rei et intellectus36).
Questa definizione comporta l’esistenza di due elementi diversi, la mente umana e la realtà
extramentale, indipendente dal nostro pensiero. L’adeguamento veritativo – chiamato anche
corrispondenza o conformità – si compie in termini di essere, quando cioè la mente conosce
qualche aspetto dell’essere della realtà e lo esprime nel giudizio. In questo senso la nozione di
conoscenza, esaminata nel cap. 1, include essenzialmente la verità. La conoscenza o è vera o non
esiste.

“L’adeguamento veritativo non è simmetrico: non è la realtà che deve adeguarsi alla
mente umana, ma è la mente umana a doversi adeguare alla realtà, ovvero lasciarsi misurare da
essa. «L’intelletto si dice vero quando si conforma alla realtà, falso quando è discordante dalla
realtà».37 La verità non è una creazione umana, ma una scoperta, anzi un dono o una luce
dell’essere per la mente. Secondo Aristotele, un enunciato è vero quando dice che è ciò che è, e
che non è ciò che non è, ed è falso quando, al contrario, dice che è ciò che non è, oppure che non
è ciò che è.38 La relazione veritativa non simmetrica fa sì che la nostra intelligenza possa trovarsi
nella situazione di un mancato adeguamento alla realtà, quando ancora non ha giudicato, o che
possa essere in contrasto con la realtà, quando si trova nel falso. Quindi dalla nozione di vero
seguono subito le nozioni di falsità, che consiste nella discordanza tra la mente che giudica e la
realtà che si giudica, e di menzogna, giudizio falso di cui l’autore conosce la falsità, emesso a
scopo di inganno, cioè per far cadere una persona in errore.

“Il termine della corrispondenza veritativa della mente è la realtà o l’essere. L’elemento
cui la mente deve adeguarsi si dice realtà (res) per sottolineare sia la trascendenza dell’essere
rispetto al pensiero – la cosa reale non è la cosa pensata o immaginata – sia la sua indipendenza
ontologica, in quanto la realtà continua ad essere quello che è anche se noi la pensiamo
diversamente. Naturalmente anche l’intelletto è una realtà, per cui può essere conosciuto secondo
verità se i giudizi corrispondenti si adeguano a ciò che l’intelletto è e fa. Dal termine res procede
la denominazione di realismo conoscitivo. Siccome la res è propriamente l’ente, possiamo dire
che l’essere è il fondamento della verità: «la verità è fondata sull’ente».39 Le cose non sono a
seconda di come le pensiamo o le vogliamo, ma siamo noi a doverle pensare in conformità a
quello che esse sono. La verità quindi è la dimensione metafisica centrale della nostra
conoscenza. Si conclude che la nozione di verità come adeguamento alla realtà è l’elemento
fondamentale del realismo metafisico. Chi non accetta tale nozione – o una sua equivalente – non
sostiene una posizione realistica.

35
J. J. SANGUINETI, Introduzione alla gnoseologia, Le Monnier, Florence, 2003, pp. 272-278.
36
De Veritate, q. 1, a. 1.
37
SAN TOMMASO, In I Peri Hermeneias, lect. 3, n. 29.
38
Cfr. Metafisica, IV, 1011 b 27-28.
39
SAN TOMMASO, Summa Theologiae, I, a. 16, a. 3, ad 2. Cfr. ibid., a. 1, ad 3: « l’essere della cosa (esse rei) (…)
causa la verità dell’intelletto».

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 “D’altra parte, la versione realistica della verità appartiene al nucleo della comprensione
metafisica originaria, comune ad ogni essere umano. Essa è un presupposto assoluto del
linguaggio, della scienza e della vita pratica dell’uomo. Senza la verità realistica, questi tre
ambiti perderebbero ogni possibile senso. I filosofi non realisti che hanno difficoltà ad accettarla
talvolta non capiscono come si potrebbe spiegare il fatto che una nostra situazione mentale si
«adegui», cioè sia simile o addirittura identica alla realtà materiale, essendo i due termini
eterogenei (mente e realtà fisica). Ma abbiamo già affrontato questo problema quando ci siamo
riferiti alla natura dell’atto di conoscere (cfr. cap. 1, n. 1), capace di rispecchiare in modo
immateriale e intenzionale gli elementi ontologici della realtà materiale.”40

Further reading for metaphysical realism/methodical realism/moderate realism on truth:

1. Book II, Part II, sections E (Truth) and F (Evidence, the Ultimate Criterion of Truth) of Juan
José Sanguineti’s Logic and Gnoseology, Urbaniana University Press, Rome, 1987, pp. 246-265.
The original 1983 Italian edition: Logica e gnoseologia, Urbaniana University Press, Rome,
1983, pp. 265-273 (La verità) and 274-285 (L’evidenza, ultimo criterio di verità) ; 2. Chapter 2
(Truth and Knowledge) of Alejandro Llano’s Gnoseology, Sinag-Tala, Manila, 2001, pp. 15-39.
Italian edition: Filosofia della conoscenza, La Monnier, Florence, pp. 17-42 (La verità e la
conoscenza). Spanish: Gnoseologia, EUNSA, Pamplona, 1991, pp. 25-50 (La verdad y el
conocimiento); 3. Part III (La Verdad) of Rafael Corazón González’s Filosofía del conocimiento,
EUNSA, Pamplona, 2002, pp. 139-210 ; 4. Chapters 7 (La verità), 8 (La giustificazione della
verità), and 9 (Il dinamismo verso la verità) of Sanguineti’s Introduzione alla gnoseologia, Le
Monnier, Florence, 2003, pp. 246-325 ; 5. The chapters on truth in Sanguineti’s El conocimiento
humano: una perspectiva filosófica, Ediciones Palabra, Madrid, 2005.

40
J. J. SANGUINETI, op. cit., pp. 246-248.

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