Revised excerpt from Métaphysique du paradoxe, vol. I, Paradox and the Limits of Knowledge, ch. VIII, “Truth or Reality?”, § 6, “Metaphysics: Truth and Reality,” pp. 229–231, and Appendix 12, pp. 261–262.
Is truth simply the agreement between intelligence and reality? The distinction between logical and ontological truth shows, on the contrary, that knowledge presupposes an already intelligible reality: truth does not result from knowledge; it precedes it.
Reality and Truth in Metaphysics
Even if the most abstract (the most mathematical) logic were nothing but pure calculation, there would at least be conformity between the calculation and its result, that is, in fine, conformity of intelligence to the thing (conformitas intellectus cum re, or adequatio intellectus ad rem)1, which is the definition of logical or formal truth (in traditional—or simply ordinary!—logic).
It is essential here to point out the imprecision of the simplified formula “conformity between intelligence and the thing,” which is too frequently used2 Indeed, a classical distinction is made between logical or formal truth (the conformity of intelligence to the thing) and ontological truth, which is the conformity or “conformability” of the thing to intelligence (conformitas vel conformabilitas rei cum intellectu, or adequatio rei ad intellectum). In the former, the thing is a logical being in the intelligence that thinks it; in the latter, the thing has real existence and is accessible to the intellect: this is truth as an objective property of being.
As an attribute coextensive with being, this truth is said to be transcendental (like the two other “properties” of being, the one and the good); it exceeds or transcends the genera, species, differences, or accidents that give being a particular form and limit it. Kant did, in a certain way, identify this twofold aspect: “Hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects […]. Let us then make the experiment whether we may not succeed better with the problems of metaphysics, by assuming that the objects must conform to our mode of cognition” (Preface to the second edition); but only in order to reject one in favor of the other alone, the object henceforth merely submitting to the form of our understanding and being reduced to the status of phenomenon.
It was Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) who brought together the Aristotelian, subjectivist current of truth3, as the goal of all knowledge and perfection of intelligence, and the Platonic current of an immutable and eternal truth (an Idea in which created minds participate), continued by St. Augustine (354–430), in which truth dominates and imposes itself upon the mind. He thereby showed truth to be at once a perfection of intelligence—logical truth—and an objective property of being—ontological truth—as the two sides of the universal and its reflection in the individual, of the objective and the subjective, of the real and the formal.
Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), in his inquiry into the essence of truth4, did not overlook this distinction: “veritas [est] adaequatio rei (creandae) ad intellectum (divinum), [which guarantees] veritas as adaequatio intellectus (humani) ad rem (creatam).” The fact that “truth [is] the adequation of the (created) thing to the (divine) intelligence” guarantees “truth as the adequation of (human) intelligence to the (created) thing.”
Once “freed” from theology, originary truth (which precedes judgment) is, for him, the Dasein’s contact with being, the unconcealment (alētheia) of being—this “openness to being” being properly metaphysical. The same return to the essence of truth (and denunciation of sophistry) is found in Maxence Caron, a major interpreter of Heidegger: without a notion of truth, the very act of thinking loses all coherence and meaning5.
In summary, from a metaphysical perspective, the truth of things consists essentially in their conformity to the absolute Intelligence upon which they depend; or, accidentally, in the aptitude of things to become the object of limited, speculative human intelligence, which submits itself to the thing it knows.
From this standpoint, truth is not a product of the human mind but exists independently of it; moreover, the intelligibility in itself of every being does not imply that every being is totally intelligible to man6— being itself is not reducible to the rational, and human intelligence is, moreover, limited. In any event, the object of metaphysics is therefore as much “ultimate” reality, being in itself, “being as being”7, as it is truth.
Adæquatio intellectus et rei
Truth as the “adequation of intelligence and the thing” can be a misleading shortcut, both with regard to the definition of truth and to Aristotelian-Thomistic doctrine. As Désiré Mercier remarks, “the simplistic interpretation of the definition: ‘veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus’ is, ultimately, the adequate expression of no truth whatsoever.”8
Indeed, it is impossible to compare an objective concept directly with an “external thing”: “to claim to know an absolute thing is to require that the physical entity and that which is not the entity itself, but its representation, be identical: it is to seek to identify two contradictory things” (ibid., p. 391). The adæquatio must therefore be understood not as an identity between the thing and its mental representation, but as the conformity of a judgment to what is.
Truth thus presupposes two acts of apprehension: one by which a thing becomes an intelligible object, the other by which a predicate is apprehended, before the latter is attributed to the subject in the judgment (ibid., p. 389). Two relations must therefore be distinguished: that of the apprehended subject to the predicates by which it can be represented, which pertains to ontological truth; and that of representative thought to the previously apprehended subject, which pertains to logical truth or falsity (ibid., p. 390).
“This is why the concept, taken in isolation, is not yet either true or false: the judgment alone essentially possesses the character of truth or falsity” (ibid., p. 402; emphasis ours). This is already Aristotle’s doctrine: “truth is the union of two notes, as the object of an affirmation, or their separation, as the object of a negation”9; in other words, “the true is the object of the statement that what is, is, and that what is not, is not; the false is that what is, is not, and that what is not, is” (Mercier, ibid., p. 403).
Thomas Aquinas interprets in the same sense the Augustinian formula according to which “the true is that which is”: it does not mean that truth is simply identical with the existence of the thing, but that “there is truth when being is affirmed of something that is” (De Veritate, q. I, art. 1, Reply 1).
The traditional formula veritas est adæquatio intellectus et rei can therefore be retained, provided that it is not made to say more than it does: by “intelligence,” what must be understood here is judgment, and by “reality,” first the objective identity of the terms of the judgment, and then their objective reality.10
But this logical truth itself presupposes a more fundamental truth. If intelligence can conform its judgment to the thing, it is because the thing is already intelligible. The adæquatio intellectus ad rem thus points back to the adæquatio rei ad intellectum: the truth of knowledge presupposes the truth of being.
Conclusion
Truth, therefore, does not ultimately reside in the adequation that human intelligence might succeed in establishing with an external reality. Such adequation is possible only because reality is already intelligible: before human intelligence conforms itself to the thing, the thing is itself conformed to the Intelligence from which it proceeds. Logical truth thus presupposes ontological truth. To know is not to produce the intelligibility of reality, but to participate, within the limits of human intelligence, in an intelligibility that precedes it.
Footnotes
- This truth is present in intelligence in an inchoative manner (from inchoare: to begin) in simple apprehension, and formally in judgment.[↩]
- See below: Adæquatio intellectus et rei.[↩]
- More precisely, according to J. Moreau’s paper, there is in Aristotle a “pre-predicative” truth. Indeed, “since Aristotle understands truth as the agreement of judgments with reality, this reality itself must be apprehended independently of the judgments made about it: from the Aristotelian perspective, it is apprehended through sensory perception, which reveals the thing, and through intellectual intuition, which grasps essences”; Paul Moraux, “Aristote et les questions de méthode. Communications présentées au Symposium Aristotelicum tenu à Louvain du 24 août au 1er sept. 1960,” L’Antiquité classique, vol. 32, no. 1, 1963 (pp. 242–246), p. 243.[↩]
- “De l’essence de la vérité” (1954; the course itself was delivered in the winter of 1931–1932), Questions I et II, Paris: Gallimard, 1968, pp. 159–195.[↩]
- Cf. La Vérité captive — De la philosophie, Paris: Cerf/Ad Solem, 2009.[↩]
- François Chenique, Éléments de Logique classique. L’art de penser, de juger et de raisonner, L’Harmattan, 2006, pp. 109–110.[↩]
- Understand this as “being insofar as it is being” or “being as related to principles.” For an overview of interpretations of the object of metaphysics in Aristotle and of the difficulties left unresolved in his texts (especially the contradictions between Metaphysics IV 2, 1059a22, Physics A 9, and Sophistical Refutations 172a12), see L. Elders, “Aristote et l’objet de la métaphysique,” Revue Philosophique de Louvain, 1962, vol. 60, no. 66, pp. 165–183. In particular, “the compilatory character of Book K [… supports the idea] that this passage represents an attempt to synthesize two different conceptions of metaphysics” (ibid.): on the one hand, that of “being as being,” whose universality is understood as the connection of beings with their principles and, ultimately, with the One and Plurality; and, on the other hand, the older and more original “conception of a philosophy of immaterial, unmoved being, which leaves mobile being as the object of physics alone […], a doctrine reducing being to two principles similar to Plato’s famous reduction” (ibid.). See also Pierre Aubenque’s magisterial study, Le Problème de l’être chez Aristote, Paris: PUF, 1962.[↩]
- Désiré Mercier (1851–1926), “La notion de la Vérité (à propos d’un article de la Revue Thomiste intitulé : ‘Jugement et vérité’)”, Revue néo-scolastique, 6th year, no. 24, 1899, pp. 371–403. We follow him here.[↩]
- Metaphysics, VI, 3, 1027b. “As for being in the sense of true, and non-being in the sense of false, they consist solely in the conjunction and separation of the attribute and the subject, [20] in a word, in affirmation or negation. Truth is the affirmation of the agreement of subject and attribute, and the negation of their disagreement, [that is, judgment]” is the translation of Pierron & Zévort (Paris: Ébrard, Joubert, 1840, vol. I).[↩]
- Mercier, ibid., p. 403. The Critériologie générale ou théorie générale de la certitude (1899, then 1906) is the third version (after the autograph versions of 1885 and 1889) of the philosophy course of the future (1906) Cardinal Mercier. Today, we speak of epistemology. The interest of these neo-Thomistic works lies in their very purpose: “to bring contemporary doctrines into relation and to attempt to resolve, drawing inspiration from traditional ideas, the questions that nineteenth-century thought placed at the center of its properly philosophical concerns.”[↩]
