KNOWING AS A FUNCTION OF LOVE
R.T. Allen

There is just one point in Dr M. Sumares' recent article, 'Revisting Bertrand Russell's Refusal of the Christian Faith', which I would qualify:

We might think of this basic belief upon which orthodox Christian theism is founded in the following way: For just about every kind of object, knowledge precedes love, or simply, we must know something before coming to love that something or somebody; relation to God, however, love precedes knowledge to the extent that an inchoate love for God is constitutive of human knowing and willing, though we may not be aware of it.1

It seems to be obviously true: for boy to love girl, boy must first meet girl. And it was an axiom of Scholastic philosophy, and restated by Brentano, who distinguished three fundamental forms of mental act – presentations, judgments, and acts of love and hate – and asserted that the second and third are consequent and dependent upon the first.2 Yet, I propose to argue, with the aid of Max Scheler and Michael Polanyi, the reverse is at least as true.

Within a Christian framework, the primacy of love can be affirmed a priori and quite simply: God is love (I Jn 4:8); man is made in the image of God (Gen.1:26-7); and therefore man too is love, and all distinctively human (personal) acts and functions are expressions and specifications of love, knowing among them.3
That is precisely what Max Scheler argued in his 'Liebe und Erkenntnis'.4 He begins by quoting two opposing statements:

One can only get to know that which one loves and the deeper and fuller the knowledge is to become, the stronger, more forceful and livelier must be the love (Goethe).
Every great love is the daughter of a great cognition (Leonardo da Vinci).

Both of these he opposes to modern 'bourgeois' (and Objectivist and Positivist) opinion that love can only blind and that genuine apprehension requires emotional restraint. Scheler argues for Goethe's position rather than Leonardo's, which he sees as representing Greek and Indian views of the matter.

Despite their great differences, both the Greek and Indian views assert that love follows cognition. The Indian view, he states, is that love arises from a transition from not-knowing to knowing which in turn results from a dematerialisation of the object, the recognition that the world is maya or 'illusion'. The Greek view, most fully articulated by Plato, sees love as the passage from lower to higher cognition, of the 'not-being' of matter, to the higher cognition of the 'real being' of the Forms. It is a striving which is completed and so terminated in perfect knowledge.5

In contrast, says Scheler, Goethe expresses the Christian view, which begins with God's love for unlovely since fallen man (rather with God's overflowing love which creates the world out of nothing). Love is thus a condescension from God to man, and not a passage from lower to higher. Scheler thinks that the Christian revolution in world-view has not been fully carried through in this respect, save only by St Augustine and some of his followers such as Malebranche and Pascal, and that St Thomas Aquinas followed Aristotle too much in regarding love as a striving which must be preceded by an intellectual act, desire as requiring a prior perception, and wishing as requiring a prior conceptual grasp of the object. This, he states, has serious theological consequences for Thomism.6 St Augustine in contrast began a new epistemology and psychology in which intellectual acts arise, not from the object and its attractiveness, but from a prior act of taking-an-interest and thus from the love or hate which motivates it. Without these, there can be no perception, memory or thought of an object; no selection from all possible objects of those which we in fact perceive and think about; no direction of our suppositions and perceptions; nor any intensification of our cognition of an object.

Scheler, in this essay, considers the matter only in these general and abstract terms. But consider again the vague moods of restlessness and stirring in which we want something but as yet do not know what it is. While love, for a person already met, can strike out of the blue or gradually grow, it can also exist first as vague yearning for someone else and then be focused upon a particular person. More generally, modern studies which emphasise the activity of the mind and its projection of a 'field' of awareness prior to particular objects, tend to support Scheler's view. For example, the perceptual processes of animals are highly selective and geared to what is significant for their lives. The world is first perceived in terms of emotional significance and thus motor responses towards or away from things.7 It is not the objective loudness but the meaning of the utterance of one's name or of the crying of one's child which catches our attention. We do not simply register a mass of equal stimuli, but respond differentially to them and distinguish 'messages' from 'noise'. We may assume therefore that there operates in knowing a prior taking-an-interest, not only in certain sorts of thing and particular things, but in reality, the world, in general. For a central fact of human nature is that we are not born with a set of determinate instincts, which would close our minds to things not impinging upon them, but with general capacities often manifesting themselves at later stages. We are essentially open to the world, able to take an interest in anything. Hence we have both some relatively specific interests from birth, and also a general openness which becomes specified into more determinate interests, and perhaps closed by determinate dislikings as well as by lack of time and energy. In some people, that openness seems to disappear as they come to live within a narrow and unvarying round. Therefore there is an original taking-an-interest from which emotions and knowledge develop together, and with them all forms of activity, each becoming more determinate, so that a particular instance of either can precede and generate a particular instance of the other.
To support this thesis in more detail, I shall next to the work of Michael Polanyi, and specifically to Ch 6, 'Intellectual Passions', of his magnum opus, Personal Knowledge.8 The aim of that work is to refute what he called 'Objectivism' and its ideal of an exact, critically tested, detached and impersonal knowledge, and to replace with a throughly personal account of knowing. His general strategy, there and elsewhere, is to take the battle to Objectivism's own ground, the natural sciences themselves, especially physics and chemistry, in which it believes its ideal to be realised in fact. There it was Polanyi who had the advantage, for he was an internationally renowned scientist and not, like his opponents, one who merely theorized about science and dictated, from the outside, what it should do. Hence he aims to show that the scientist must passionately engage and actively care about his science and its standards and values, and then to generalise from the example of science to all intellectual pursuits and further to all the activities of civilized man.

His argument is that scientific passions are not merely psychological by-products (as when Archimedes shouted 'Eureka!'), which can be ignored, for they have 'a logical function which contributes an indispensable element to science',9 or, rather, three functions: selective, heuristic and persuasive. It is the first which is specifically relevant here.
The selective function has two aspects: to signal that a discovery is intellectually precious and that it is precious to science. And behind that is the felt conviction of their value which selects science itself as worthy of pursuit. It is this which is Polanyi's over-all concern. Science along with the other great articulate systems of civilization, such as religion and law, evokes, imposes and claims to be right, those emotions which sustain and appraise it and appraise its theories for their intellectual beauty as a token of contact with reality.10 If science were only a body of fact, as Objectivism claims, it could not evoke any interest except a 'justification' in terms of its technological utility, which would crimp and stunt it.

The second aspect of the selective function gives the underlying desire to discover the truth about nature a specific direction. Out of all the facts which are known or knowable, only a few are of scientific interest. The appreciation of this interest, which relies on a sense of intellectual beauty, cannot be dispassionately defined, as neither can the beauty of works of art nor the excellence of noble actions. Without selection and guidance by emotional appraisal of the scientific value of what is known or appears likely to be discovered, enquiry would 'inevitably spread out into a desert of trivialities'. What is needed is a general vision of reality which yields a scale of interest and plausibility, so that important conceptions can be upheld as intrinsically plausible even when there is evidence against them at the moment, and others can be rejected as specious even though there may be some evidence for them.11

A scientist, in selecting a problem to be pursued, requires a sense, a feeling, for problems which are likely to be soluble, soluble by him with the resources and time available, and to be of some wider value and significance for science.12 There is no set of formulae or rules for this. Only what is routine and thus easily anticipatable and of low interest, we may add, can be attained by the scientist without emotional involvement in what he is doing. As for what constitutes scientific value, Polanyi suggests three joint factors, unevenly distributed over the natural sciences: certainty or accuracy, systematic relevance or profundity, and intrinsic interest.13 Sensitivity to such values, and their presence, absence and degree in problems, theories and results, is necessary to their scientific evaluation as worth investigating further and to deciding if results are acceptable or unacceptable. It is required to terminate or provoke to further enquiry, as well as to turn a general interest in scientific research into a specific intention to take up and prosecute a particular problem or line of enquiry.
What, in effect, we see in Polanyi's account of the scientist's passionate engagement in his science, is a love of science itself, of scientific research and of the ever more comprehensive and profound picture of the universe that it creates and sustains, and thus a specific expression of a general love of the world and of coming to know it.

 

A corollary of the doctrine of the priority of love over knowing, is that systematic ignorance is the result of indifference towards reality, or some aspect of it, and systematic distortion of reality, or some aspect of it, is the result of hatred towards it. With allowance for the pressure of other interests, the consequent lack of time and other resources, and also of intellectual capacity, we are generally ignorant of something because we are not interested in it. A good example of this is the Enlightenment's attitude to the past: almost everything before the birth, or rebirth, of Reason in the Renaissance and its earlier birth in Greece and Rome, it wrote off as the 'Dark Ages'. But they were dark, not because they could not be known, but because, for the Enlightenment, they were not worth knowing, and any history of them would be only a tale of superstition, folly and crime, as Voltaire said. As things stand now, in English history for example, there is only shrinking period of about 100 years after the departure of the Roman army and administration about which little known is definitely known. If we really want to know, we shall find ways of knowing, sooner or later.14 Similarly, the great reductionisms of the modern age, are motivated by hatred of the higher levels – life, intelligence, personhood – in versions of an inverted Gnosticism. To see this one only has to look at the emotional tones in which reductionist doctrines and arguments are expressed.

Russell himself provides an illustration of these corollaries. Dr Sumares refers to his refusal to advance beyond empirical observations and scientific theories the radical questions that Copleston wished to raise. But why did Russell refuse to follow the argument? Even more so, why did the Logical Positivism that succeeded his Logical Atomism, declare all such questions meaningless (which, to his credit, Russell, never did)? Because, I suggest, they all follow from the Enlightenment's arrogant assertion of human intellectual and moral autonomy, individual autonomy. As Kant said, enlightenment is 'man's release from his self-imposed tutelage', that is, to any authority, whether it be human tradition (what Edmund Burke called 'the capital and bank of men and ages) or God.15 The modern, enlightened and emancipated mind, will not allow any questions to be raised which might suggest that there is anything superior to itself: it hates the possibility that there might be such a thing, and therefore does not want to know. The object of 'a free man's worship', to quote another essay from 'Why I Am Not A Christian', is ultimately himself.

It is wholly convergent with the thesis of the priority of love over knowing, that it would be interesting and profitable to make further investigation of the ways in which indifference was kept people in ignorance and of ways in which hatred has distorted knowledge.

Notes:
1. Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia, Tome 62, 2-4, p.894.
2. Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, 1874.
3. This provides the answer to the old problems of God's unity, simplicity and complexity, which arise from implicit acceptance of the axiom that Cusanus formulated as omnia determination est negatio: that to be something is not to be something else, that all predicates and attributes are exclusive of at least some others, and thus all existence is finite. Hence God is a blank unity, which, as Hegel realised, is the same as nothingness. Cusanas' own escape from this conclusion, that God is coincidenta oppositorum, is sheer nonsense. But personal attributes are precisely those which exclude only their privatives and corruptions, as partly realised by Socrates and Plato in their doctrine of the unity of virtues. A fully personal conception of God, purged of all impersonal and abstractly logical concepts and categories, resolves this and the other fundamental problems of theology.
4. Gesammelte Werke (Bern, Franke, 1954-), Bd 6. All quotations are from a private translation.
5. But see J. Risk, Eros and Psyche (Toronto UP, Toronto, 1964), and A.H. Armstrong, 'Platonic eros and Christian agape' (reprinted in Plotinian and Christian Studies, London, Variorum Reprints, 1979), on hints in Plato and Plotinus of an outgoing love in God.
6. But see S. Strasser, The Phenomenology of Feeling (trans. Wood, Pittsburg, Duquesne University Press, 1977), p.234, on Aquinas and the cognitive role of amor.
7. 'The world offers itself to a child physiognomically and expressively, laden with feelings'; 'Physiognomical not cognitive, attributes of the environment are primary. The principle applies as much to the comprehension of inanimate objects as it does to the understanding of living organisms. As Wertheimer states, "An object is just as sinister as it is black; in fact it is sinister first of all"': D. Katz, Gestalt Psychology (trans. Tyson, London, Methuen, 1951), pp. 154, 82. Colours are perceived primarily in terms of their emotional and motor significance rather than because of their colour qualities: see Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception (trans. C. Smith, London, Routledge, 1962), Pt II, 1, and the studies cited therein.
8. London, Routledge, and Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1978: hereafter 'PK'.
9. PK p.134.
10. PK pp. 133-4.
11. PK p.135.
12. PK pp. 123-4.
13. PK p.143.
14. See the studies and arguments of S. Jáki, SJ, and others upon the reasons why a self-sustaining tradition of scientific research, and, I would add, also of historical research, has been achieved only with the Christian world. For Christianity alone explicitly affirms not only the order intelligibility and contingency of the world, and thus its openness to empirical research, but also its goodness, its propriety as an object of love and thus the value of knowing it.
15. 'What is Enlightenment?', in Kant on History, trans. L. Beck, Bobbs-Merrill, 1963.