The Philosophy of the Organism: Notes on the Function of Nutrition

Abstract

The Philosophy of the Organism:Notes on the Function of Nutrition Jacques Maritain In this introduction, I merely wish to provide a few opening comments concerning this obscure article by Maritain, extracted from a natural philosophy course and published originally in the Revue thomiste in 1937.1 It may seem strange to the reader that Nova et Vetera would choose to reproduce an article on the philosophy of nutritive activity, especially given that said article was written over eighty years ago. Is not such a text, at best, a dated product of a by-gone (neo-)Scholastic age? Is it of anything more than passing historical interest? The reproach is understandable, but the methodology deployed by Maritain in the article prevents the critique from being correct. As the reader will see, in the text presented here, Maritain clearly draws upon the science of his day in considering the phenomena of nutrition and morphogenesis. However, he does not, one could say, phenomenally consider those phenomena. Put in more precise philosophical vocabulary, we may say that the objective light under which these phenomena are scrutinized is that of natural philosophy, not the particular empirical sciences in their early-twentieth-century state of development. His interest is with how the phenomena reveal something pertaining to mobile being as such. In contrast to the positive scientist, he is [End Page 633] here concerned with the very ontological constitution of mobile being. Adopting a device used by F.-X. Maquart,2 we could say that the concern here is mobile being (or, sensible being), accenting the ultimate formal perspective and concern of the philosopher: "being under the conditions of poverty and division which affect it in that universe which is the material universe, being viewed from the outlook of the mystery peculiar to becoming."3 Thus, this brief article provides a kind of "example in actu exercito" of how Maritain differentiates, within the first degree of abstraction, an empiriological-scientific investigation from one that is ontological-sapiential.4 This is not the place to explain, let alone defend, Maritain on this point,5 and I would be remiss if I did not note that there are weighty voices of dissent against what Maritain claims regarding these matters.6 Still, despite intra-Thomistic dissent on the matter, I am of the opinion that Maritain's subtle deployment of Cajetan's distinction between the ratio formalis obiecti ut res and the ratio formalis obiecti ut obiectum provides a capital tool for the analysis of issues surrounding the differentiation of the [End Page 634] sciences.7 The present article is merely offered as a "laboratory" for seeing how that claim plays out. Below, the reader will see how Maritain utilizes scientific observations from thinkers who clearly have a mechanistic bias, all the while putting their data to good Aristotelian use. As he says on several occasions, so long as their explanations stay upon the plane of phenomena, such explanations have their own scientific and explanatory value. That is, such empiriological analysis has its own scientific consistency within a body of demonstration pertaining primarily to the phenomenal order.8 Of course, a metaphysic is implicit within such empiriological forms of scientific knowledge, and this gives birth to the temptation for the scientist to openly express his or her often-implicit mechanistic biases. Still, as Maritain states in reflecting on the descriptions of life provided by the scientific sources that he cites: "Even if one holds a mechanistic philosophy, the act of describing a vital process requires one to employ a language that is in no way mechanistic." Empiriological analysis hides the true ontological foundations of science, though the true metaphysic remains there in a muted, material manner. They have not formally been subjected to the light of philosophical analysis. The situation is somewhat akin to the metaphysic that is hidden in the data of common sense. Prior to being scrutinized, common human experience is not sapiential knowledge in act. That is, common sense as such does not formally attempt to subordinate the knowledge thus attained to first principles (and, above all, to the principle of non-contradiction). However, as the mind's first grasp on human experience of...