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| extramental reality. As seen above, Gilson would therefore prefer to call
such a method "philosophy," not "critical realism" because reflection
on experience, including noetic experience, is what philosophy is all about. |
| At this point, one might be inclined to write off the debate between
Maritain and Gilson as nothing more than a difference in terminology: what Maritain calls
"critical realism" Gilson calls "philosophical knowledge." But neither
Gilson nor Maritain is of a mind to accept a diplomatic solution. For Gilson,
"realism" and "critical" refer to mutually exclusive concepts: once
you start talking about realism’s inability to gain intellectual respectability
without a critical approach, you are reaching beyond realism’s crucial premise, to
wit, that our knowledge of extramental reality is spontaneous, self-evident, and thus
indemonstrable, And that means attempting to justify extramental reality by knowledge
itself, the very starting point of idealism. For Maritain, "realism" and
"critical," far from being mutually exclusive, are intimately linked. The universalis
dubitatio de veritate imposes itself out of the human spirit’s need to attain an
ever deepening understanding of what it knows, which means a progressively greater
verification of the principles of knowledge. |
| Gilson has confronted Maritain’s brand of critical realism with a
powerful challenge. If, as Maritain holds, critique is a secondary operation that cannot
validate realism; if that validation results from the intellect’s primary operation
– a spontaneous, indemonstrable intuition of extramental being --, then what has
Maritain’s critique actually gained for realism? Where he justifies the exercise of
critique by appealing to the natural striving of a spiritual being to achieve perfect
self-reflection, of which he regards the exercise of validating each step of knowledge as
an example, Gilson |
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