Truth in Aquinas

John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134569557
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Provocative and sophisticated, Truth in Aquinas is a fascinating re-evaluation of a key area - truth - in the work of Thomas Aquinas. John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock's provocative but strongly argued position is that many of the received views of Aquinas as philosopher and theologian are wrong.
This compelling and controversial work builds on the amazing reception of Radical Orthodoxy (Routledge, 1999).

1
Truth and correspondence

I

How should one respond to the death of realism, the death of the idea that thoughts in our minds can represent to us the way things actually are in the world? For such a death is widely proclaimed by contemporary philosophers.

In summary, they argue that since we only have access to the world via knowledge, it is impossible to check knowledge against the world in order to see if it corresponds with it. This is a powerful and perhaps unanswerable contention, and yet if we accept it, it seems to follow that there can be no such thing as truth at all.

In what follows, however, we wish to argue that one need not accept these essentially secular conclusions. Rather, we want to suggest that a reconsideration of Aquinas can help us to meet the problems arising from the seeming insupportability of a correspondence theory of truth. This might appear to be an inquiry doomed from the outset, since Aquinas is himself a proponent of just such a theory. However, we will try to show why he is not quite the correspondence theorist he is sometimes taken to be, but rather something much more interesting: a theological theorist of truth who challenges in advance the assumptions of modern epistemologists at a level they do not even imagine.

First, however, let us see what sorts of difficulties arise if one rejects correspondence altogether. Bruce Marshall has argued that one need not fear suspicion of correspondence, for, first of all, the death of realism need not mean an out-and-out embrace of anti-realism, and, secondly, theology introduces a specifically Christological mode of correspondence according to which, Christ the God-man is true in his imitation of the life of the eternal Trinity.¹ In the first case, according to Marshall, there is in fact an alternative to anti-realism which does not make appeal to correspondence. Marshall furnishes us with a variety of reasons why, for the purposes of one’s day-to-day existence, one should turn to a ‘disquotational’ theory of truth, which is not anti-realist, although it involves no notion of correspondence, as espoused by Alfred Tarski and later Donald Davidson. This, he claims, is the best available philosophical—though not theological—account of what truth is.² Why is it such a good theory of truth? The main reason, supposedly, is that it is not really a theory of truth, properly speaking, since for disquotationalism, truth reduces to being, or to ‘what is the case’, and so avoids any illconceived comparisons of being and thought altogether. So, when one says ‘It is true that one is in Oxford’, one might as well dispense with the ‘It is true that’ and simply say ‘one is in Oxford’. Since there is here no freight of correspondence between truth and reality, this theory has no need of recourse to realism. Instead it is ontologically neutral. This means, as Marshall argues, that for all practical and linguistic purposes, the world simply ‘is’ as it presents itself to us, or as we pragmatically take it to be.³

Having established this, Marshall nonetheless argues, in the second place, that there is an instance when correspondence must re-surface. For the Christian, he says, what one most seeks is to imitate Christ, who ‘is’ the Truth.⁴ So, here, invoking Aquinas’s account of the incarnate Christ’s embodiment of eternal truth and our participation in this by imitation of Christ, Marshall allows for a mirroring of thought and reality in a realm quite remote from the busy commerce of everyday where disquotationalism exerts its minimalist rule.

Now, there are various reasons why one might wish to be critical of Marshall’s defence of the Tarski-Davidson theory of truth. Put briefly, one might suggest the following. First, the ‘disquotational’ theory of truth does not necessarily point us beyond what is conventionally taken to be true, and fails to offer any reasons why it might or might not be justified to make a particular assertion; and so, after all, one might say (despite Davidson’s disclaimers, which appeal implicitly to a scientistic naturalism ungrounded by his own primary philosophy), that this seems tantamount to a return to relativism.

It is true that Davidson, and Marshall in his wake, seek to evade a pure deflation of truth, and also relativism, through an espousal of ‘holism’ as to meaning. The possibility of mutual understanding is held to require the assumption that all basic human concepts are identical in all cultures and all cohere with each other. However, this disputable claim is itself compatible with a kind of naturalistic apriorism; ‘truth’ here may be merely the bias of the human species. As John McDowell and Hilary Putnam point out, it seems that, for Davidson, sensory information from the world cannot impinge as ‘meaningful’ within the conceptual space of human beliefs and cogitations. Davidson only establishes an emphatic realism when he affirms that the external world determines through material causality the workings of our brain, which he takes as equivalent to mental events in terms of a matching of neural effects to instances of thought, item by item. Despite this matching, Davidson obscurely allows no complete reduction of the psychic to the neural. He remains, therefore, with an unsustainable dualism which must collapse either into a thoroughgoing physicalism, which would hand the determination of truth entirely over to natural science, or else into a species-relativism in such a way that the one ‘coherence’ we are locked into, perhaps discloses nothing whatsoever concerning the world and is itself radically inexplicable.

Secondly, Marshall fails to mention that this purely secular account of truth runs into a number of aporias or contradictions. Indeed, the most obvious of these is that ‘disquotationalism’ does not negotiate the one most crucial instance where one really cannot get rid of the word ‘true’, namely, in the sentence presumably very close to disquotationalist hearts: ‘It is true that all instances of the word true are redundant’.⁵ One might think that one could also reduce this sentence to ‘all instances of the word “true” are redundant’. However, this is not the case, because in this meta-statement, whether formulated in the version explicitly including the word ‘true’ or not, one is saying that the world is such that one can only approach it pragmatically or conventionally or phenomenalistically, and if that claim is made, then this is tantamount to asserting that treating the world in this way in fact corresponds to the way the world is. Even though such a correspondence is unverifiable, it is still assumed, in such a way that one does indeed treat the world and knowledge as two different realms, and then claims that knowledge matches the world when knowledge is taken as conventional or pragmatic. ‘Truth’ here, therefore, cannot be disquoted and is not redundant, because one has made a meta-assertion about the relation of knowing to being, and that is precisely the domain in which the notion of truth retains an indispensable operativity.

To put this another way: one cannot avoid this meta-assertion of truth to undergird disquotationalism, because otherwise there is no alternative way of ruling out the strong realist idea that one can have insight into what truly is the case for the depth of things according to their essential reality. Indeed, not only is such a view a plausible alternative to a conventionalist or pragmatist one; one could even argue that to reject it is counterintuitive. For if one insists that truth is simply the way things appear to us to be, thus denying any correspondence between our mind and the way things are in themselves, then things must really be lying to us, because the way things appear to us must be concealing the way things are in themselves, or else concealing an underlying emptiness which is the real truth of things. In the latter case, if one were to say ‘There is nothing’, one would in fact be corresponding to reality.

The problem, then, is that if one asserts that one cannot get beyond the succession of the way things appear to us to be, then what is it that makes that state of affairs itself appear to us to be the case? One must here make appeal to a meta-phenomenon which would be the horizon of disclosure for all specific phenomena, but it is at this point that something like a correspondence theory of truth reappears at the heart of the very theory which claims to have done away with correspondence.⁶

In the third place, what is perhaps more worrying about Marshall’s argument, is that he founds his exaltation of Tarski and Davidson upon a partially unsatisfactory construal of Aquinas’s theory of truth. As we shall see, if Marshall had espoused more wholeheartedly Aquinas’s concept of truth, there would be no need for him to promote a dualism between the secular realm, where the redundancy of truth can reign unchallenged, and the theological realm, where correspondence is possible through Christ.⁷ For it will be shown that Aquinas’s fundamental theory of truth is as theological as it is philosophical, and is only a correspondence theory in a sense which depends entirely upon the metaphysical notion of participation in the divine Being. Hence, while, indeed, Aquinas thinks that the way to fulfil truth for fallen man is by imitation of the God-man (as will be discussed in Chapter Three), more generally he supposes that any truth whatsoever is a participation in the eternally uttered Logos. Now, Marshall does observe that Christological truth can inform all our apprehension of the world, so that we see it as created and participating in God and come to realize that, theologically speaking, to be in the truth is ‘to correspond’ to God in whom we participate. However, he underestimates the extent to which Aquinas’s more mundanely philosophical account of human knowing of material things through correspondence as such involves participation, since it is predicated on a view of the world as created. In this way, it is not simply Aristotle’s account. Thus just to the same measure that Marshall espouses a dualistic account of truth and insinuates a gap between Aquinas’s general theory of truth and his Christology, so also his theological view of truth is overweighted to Christology and does not sufficiently begin with the doctrine of Creation.

We will now therefore try to show that Marshall to a degree misconstrues Aquinas’s theory of truth as correspondence. One problem, from an historical point of view, is that he attributes a post-Fregean approach to Aquinas. (While one can perhaps see the beginnings of something anticipating Frege in the later Middle Ages, this is more to be allied with anti-Thomistic developments.)⁸ Marshall claims that Aquinas has two theories of truth, the first being a thoroughgoing Aristotelian correspondence of mind to reality, and the second, a grammatical or semantic theory in which truth is borne and brought about by sentences, and no ‘metaphysics of knowledge’ is necessarily assumed.⁹

One might perhaps concede momentarily that Aquinas attends to the question of whether something is true by attending to what it means, and this could be seen as a semantic approach. But for Aquinas, grammar is grounded in ontology, because the criterion for making sense, or deciding which word can be conjoined with which other words and in what way, is what belongs together or could belong together in ontological reality, either in things outside the mind, or in the mind’s mode of understanding those things.¹⁰ In the latter case, this criterion is logical as well as ontological only in the very ‘unmodern’ sense that there is a logical way of being, a way of things existing in the mind, which for Aquinas is as real as their extramental, material existence. By contrast, to separate Aquinas’s semantic interest from his metaphysics of knowledge is to treat the former in terms of post-Bolzanian and post-Fregean logical ‘realities’ rather than ontological actualities (one might say here that it is to approach Aquinas as if he were Duns Scotus or even William of Ockham).¹¹

For Marshall, this second, ‘semantic’ approach to truth in Aquinas allows one to assimilate his approach to modern disquotationalist theories, while shifting his affirmation of correspondence into a more purely fideistic register, for which the consequences of doctrine appear unanticipated by philosophy. By contrast, Marshall considers that earlier modern rationalist and empiricist philosophies have directly inherited Aquinas’s first approach to truth, which emphatically affirms correspondence, even if they weaken the metaphysical ground for this approach by abandoning the Aristotelian idea of a literal migration of form from embodied thing to the understanding mind. (Marshall himself, unlike the present authors, considers this Aristotelian notion to be unsustainable.) But this assertion misses the point that modern theories of correspondence are grounded in epistemology rather than ontology, and that it is variants of a ‘semantic’ approach in the late Middle Ages (wrongly attributed to Aquinas by Marshall) which mediated this shift. Today such approaches may indeed have discovered that ‘correspondence’ is non-sustainable within a merely epistemological purview, but initially they encouraged the quest for a truth prior to, or independent of, being.

By regarding Aquinas’s notion of correspondence as in continuity with modern notions, Marshall appears to over-assimilate Aquinas’s philosophical account of human knowing to recent correspondence theories which falsely imagine a raw aconceptual apprehension of the world as a basis upon which the comparison that correspondence appears to require between knowing and being can be founded.¹² This supposedly raw aconceptual apprehension is then ‘compared’ with an equally raw purely semantic internal grasp of meaning. However, for Aquinas, the real is identified in the meaningful, just as the semantic is identified in the ontological. Thus, as we shall see, correspondence or adequation for Aquinas is not a matter of mirroring things in the world or passively registering them on an epistemological level, in a way that leaves the things themselves untouched. Rather, adequating is an event which realizes or fulfils the being of things known, just as much as it fulfils truth in the knower’s mind. Correspondence here is a kind of real relation or occult sympathy—a proportion or harmony or convenientia—between being and knowledge, which can be assumed or even intuited, but not surveyed by a measuring gaze. For Aquinas, crucially, being is analogically like knowing and knowing like being. This is what makes Aquinas’s theory of truth—unlike modern theories—an ontological rather than epistemological one. Indeed, the conformity or proportion which pertains between knowing and the known introduces an aesthetic dimension to knowledge utterly alien to most modern considerations.¹³ And, in addition, truth for Aquinas has a teleological and a practical dimension, as well as a theoretical one—that is to say, the truth of a thing is taken as that thing fulfilling the way it ought to be, being the way it must be in order to be true.¹⁴ These two dimensions of truth, as the way a thing is and the way it ought to be, come together, because for Aquinas they coincide in the Mind of God. So whereas for modern correspondence theories and some other theories such as coherence theory and diagonalization, one first has a theory of truth and then might or might not apply it to theology, for Aquinas, truth is theological without remainder.¹⁵

After examining exactly in what sense Aquinas is a correspondence theorist, one therefore discovers a defence of a realist theory of truth of a very extreme kind (for here one’s mind corresponds to the ways things are at the very deepest level), against claims that truth reduces to whatever is the case according to convention or pragmatic motivation or phenomenal appearances. It follows that if Aquinas is to help us overcome the problems of correspondence, three things must be attended to: first, the idea that one can only have correspondence at all if one has God; secondly, the consequently entailed notion that a correspondence theory of truth is equally to be seen as a coherence theory of truth—that is, a theory of truth in which things are seen as true if they cohere or hold together—since here the ultimate true being of things is their supreme intelligibility in the divine Mind; and, thirdly, the implication that neither correspondence nor coherence applies in quite the way one might think according to secular canons.

II

This difference between Aquinas’s and later correspondence theories of truth is perhaps nowhere more apparent than in the first article of De Veritate which opens with a consideration of the relation of truth to being.¹⁶ Such a starting-point would make no sense at all for contemporary theories of truth which would tend...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• Radical orthodoxy series
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Preface
• 1: Truth and correspondence
• 2: Truth and vision
• 3: Truth and touch
• 4: Truth and language
• Notes
• Bibliography