II

Nature and State

4. In the light of Thomistic theory, then, what are we to think of the concept of Christian philosophy? Let me point out directly that in my opinion the principle of solution is to be found in the classical distinction between the order of specification and the order of exercise, or again, in the terminology which I shall adopt, between "nature" and "state." This means that we must distinguish between the nature of philosophy, or what it is in itself, and the state in which it exists in real fact, historically, in the human subject, and which pertains to its concrete conditions of existence and exercise.

Such a distinction, evidently, takes it for granted that philosophy has a nature, and that it is in itself something well determined.

Now it is by means of an abstraction that we are able to reflect on the nature of philosophy in itself. This abstraction is not a mere fiction. Nor is it what the ancients termed abstractio totalis, that abstraction of the genus from the species, of the logical whole from its parts, which, as they very well knew, is prescientific. It is what they called abstractio formalis, that is, the drawing out of what is intelligible in reality, or of the complex of formal notes from the things which are, as it were, their bearers. This abstractio formalis is, to my mind, at the base of all scientific work. Thanks to it the mathematician is able to speak of ensembles, the metaphysician, of consciousness and mind; and thanks to it we are here able to speak of philosophy. Turning our gaze from existential conditions it lifts it to the order of essences; it posits a possible before our thought; in sum, it disregards the state to ponder the nature.

This distinction between nature and state is not of much consequence for the sciences. (Here I use science in the narrower sense of the word, that is to say, in so far as "science" is distinct from wisdom.) In point of fact, where science is concerned, human thought has not to do with any basically differing states, save those of culture and unculture; and the changing conditions of history have no more than an outward and accidental bearing on scientific work. We may of course speak of "Greek mathematics" or "Hindu logic," yet these designations are in the end wholly material.

The order of wisdom, in which I believe we must class philosophy, is quite another matter. For in the case of wisdom which, if we are to believe Aristotle, is a form of knowledge more divine than human, and which due to the weakness of our nature, "in so many respects enslaved," we hold with a tenuous grasp -- in the case of wisdom, I say, the human mind experiences fundamentally differing states.