Henry of Ghent on Human Knowledge and Its Limits

Abstract

In this essay I present Henry of Ghent’s account of human knowledge, which is grounded in Henry’s notion of the human function. Henry of Ghent explicates the human function, i.e. exercising the natural, rational capacities of our mind, in terms of our cognitive assimilation to objects of cognition. In the ideal case of the beatific vision a created mind is presented with its perfect object, which completes our mental capacities all at once. By contrast, our acquisition of knowledge in this life is characterized by the mind’s rational, discursive activity and has to be considered as an approximation to this ideal case. In particular, human cognition is realized through our specific capacities - our senses, memory, imagination, intellect and so on. That we are cognizers set up in this way has implications for the scope of our cognition and the content of our representations: we have a limited perspective on the world. While the world is presented to us in manifold ways, Henry seeks to understand how we come to cognize things in their essential structures. His account of representation and knowledge is thus guided by his desire to explain how our conceptual content captures not only what is true of a given thing here and now, but, more importantly, what is always true of it, in terms of its nature. According to Henry, God directs all human cognitive activity through our natural capacities and provides exemplary standards as a regulating influence in human cognition, as a kind of corrective, conceptual matrix that structures our perspective on the world. I argue that in order to understand both the fundamentals and the development of Henry’s views on human knowledge we have to take into account redactional stages in Henry’s writings, as revealed in Gordon Wilson’s critical edition of Henry’s Summa, art. I-V. The redactional stages in Henry’s text do not show the alleged waning importance of divine illumination in Henry’s mature thought (as supposed by many critics), but rather a movement in the opposite direction: they confirm Henry’s strengthening of the role that this divine, regulating influence has even in cases of ordinary human cognition.