Le Cogito newmanien: La preuve du théisme by Grégory Solari

Abstract

Reviewed by: Le Cogito newmanien: La preuve du théisme by Grégory Solari Oswaldo Gallo-Serratos Le Cogito newmanien: La preuve du théisme GRÉGORY SOLARI Paris: Hermann Éditeurs, 2021. 192 pages. Paperback: $54. ISBN: 9791037008244. Apart from his extraordinary labor as editor of Newman's Philosophical Notebook, Edward Sillem passed on to us a sort of a handbook—actually, the first volume of the said Notebook—for approaching the philosophical content of Newman's works. Sillem's inspiring interpretations have provided a sound basis on which scholars have developed similar readings of Newman's metaphysical concerns, deeply related to his epistemology and philosophy of religion. The nexus is as necessary as evident—one can know something only when there is something to be known. The work of Sillem has not received the attention it deserves, resulting in a serious omission in the Newmanian studies. [End Page 81] One of the essays from the Philosophical Notebook, "Proof of Theism," has been published in a brilliant French translation that combines Newman's sharp wisdom with an accessible language for everyone interested in metaphysics or the philosophy of René Descartes. Grégory Solari, the translator, also offers an excellent guide to the essay, in which he explores the influence of Descartes on Newman, and mainly the way Newman read Descartes's cogito as a way to begin a proof of the existence of God. We find in a famous excerpt from the Apologia a twofold recognition of self-evident beings: "myself and my Creator." By stating so, Newman tried to bind both beings in a single process of reasoning, which is not, strictly speaking, a deductive one. Solari argues that these evident beings are brought home to us in the same way that the illative sense follows, i.e., not from one proposition to another but by inferring one proposition from another. The human mind works by means of enthymemes, and it is precisely an enthymeme that Newman interprets in the Cartesian principle Cogito, ergo sum—actually, Solari provides strong evidence to conclude that Newman had access to certain English translations of the Meditations in a period of a Cartesian revival in the United Kingdom during the 1850s. The recognition of the self and its creator mutually proves each other's existence. However, contrary to the traditional interpretation of Newman's argument for the existence of God, commonly elaborated on a moral basis by scholars like Terrence Merrigan, Solari indicates that its sense follows another path: its validity does not rely on the phenomenon of our moral conscience but on the consciousness itself (l'acte de conscience), which expresses in the form of cogito. Realizing the existence of God is intrinsically related to realizing the existence of the self. In his "Proof of Theism," Newman presented a particular version of the Cartesian principle, Sentio ergo sum. According to Solari's slant, this proof does not have to be interpreted as a deduction but in the sense of a "primary fact" (fait primitive), in which both the existence of the ego within the consciousness (l'acte de conscience), and the existence of God in the phenomenon of consciousness (dans le phénomène de la conscience) emerge. This said fact is presented by Newman in the form of sentio, "I sense," the most accurate term to speak of Descartes's cogito. In contrast to the common interpretation that presents ergo in the principle as indicating a syllogism, Newman himself put it in parenthesis in order to emphasize that it does not mean a process, but an inferential movement: "To call this an act of argumentation or deduction, and that it implies faith in that reasoning process which is denoted by the symbol of ergo seems to me a fallacy."1 Both sentio and sum are related through an inferential process, each proves the other one. It is in this regard that both versions of the cogito relate—in the case of Descartes, [End Page 82] his ontological argument takes us from the very definition of God as a perfect infinite Being to the acceptance of a necessary conclusion, His existence. It would be illogical to infer God's perfection while, at...