The Critical Problem

I ran across this expression  ('the critical problem') recently, in connection with a discussion of the French neo-Thomists Gilson and Maritain. It actually seems to date back at least to Descartes, but in this formulation, the problem relates to whether we can have knowledge. If we follow Descartes we find that we do have knowledge, at least of ourselves – I think therefore I am – but the problem now remains to show that the world external and independent of us exists (Copleston 255).

We can specify the question a bit more precisely, however: what is knowledge? I suspect that the question that lies behind this is ‘can we have knowledge of God?’ but we do not need to be theological metaphysicians to pose the critical problem. There are, of course, a variety of responses to the critical problem; I suspect that it is so named because it arises from Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, rather than because it is regarded as a problem critical to, say, human existence.

One response, from Gilson, to the critical problem is to rule it out. If we remove all our knowledge and then try to decide whether knowledge is, in the abstract, possible, we create a pseudo-problem (Copleston 261-2). We cannot ask ‘what is knowledge?’ unless we already know something, that is, we have to already know what knowledge is to ask whether it can exist. That said, we also have to know the meaning of some other words, the meaning of a question and so far. Bracketing out knowledge before trying to determine whether it exists seems a dead end or, at least, asking the question implies that we already know the answer, that we are aware of a capacity to know.

We can, however, reflect on what knowing is; we can aim to obtain knowledge about knowledge. Maritain observes that there is more than one kind of knowledge, and the danger of the question ‘what is knowledge?’ is that it collapses all types of knowledge into one. Scientific knowledge is one sort of knowledge, but it is only one sort. Physics does not provide information about the being of things, the ontology of sub-atomic particles, but pragmatic information about behaviour and effects. Mathematics provides abstract knowledge, but cannot exist without matter. Metaphysics includes knowledge which is entirely abstract, that is, which does not ultimately depend on something material.

This is all very well, but the fact is that all of these different sorts of knowledge are created by the human mind. Knowledge of all sorts can exist within a single mind if it chooses to turn its attention to the topic in question. While each subject might have a specific method and these methods vary substantially from discipline to discipline, they all can exist within the human mind. I can think about theoretical physics and I can think the question of the existence of God. I might not be able to do both at the same time, and it may well not be a good idea so to do, but I can think both sets of thoughts, I can operate using both methods, indeed, in these cases, while sitting at the same desk.

Another neo-Thomist, Bernard Lonergan, tackles the critical question from another point of view. He asks three linked questions: what am I doing when I am knowing? Why is doing that knowing? What do I know when I do it? (Lonergan, 2016, 35). There are, at least, at first sight, semantic difficulties: we do not go off and ‘do some knowing’. However, we do come to know. Perhaps Lonergan’s shorthand questions should be expanded a little if only to respect a little more the rules of English.

The first of Lonergan’s questions can be rephrased as ‘what am I doing when I learn something?’ When I have thoroughly learnt something, it becomes knowledge. The object of learning is to obtain the knowledge of something, whether that is knowledge of how to change the oil in my car, what the integral of x is, or what neo-Thomists say about the critical problem. All of these things are different sorts of knowledge, all can be learnt, and all can be in the same mind, that is, I can know all of them.

The question Lonergan asks therefore is about how, in general, we come to know anything, how we learn something. The question is not specific, it is not about how we learn to change the oil or integrate. His assumption is that, because there is a single human mind which can learn all these different things, there has to be an overriding process of coming to knowledge.

Perhaps this, then, indicates a problem with the critical problem as stated. Lonergan’s picture of knowledge and knowing is a dynamic one, not a static one. We cannot simply bracket out the process of learning something from the knowledge that we have. Indeed, if we are trying to learn something complex, we have to take it a step at a time (this is the educational technique of constructivism, after all) and, in all probability, go over the same ground several times before it ‘takes’.

We might also start to realise that something we have encountered before pertains to the problem at hand. I recall, in my final years as a physics undergraduate, realising that most of the things I was doing involved, in one way or another, a Fourier transform, a mathematical change of axes from, for example, time to frequency. I had learnt about Fourier transforms the year before but had never quite realised why we had them. This sort of integration of otherwise disparate things that we know solidifies the aspects. Our knowledge becomes more integrated than it was. We see a bigger, more rounded picture of the subject and its aspects.

The suggestion here, I suppose, is that if we stop learning we stop knowing, or at least, we stop being able to integrate things that we already know. Too many people today seem to think that they know enough and should not be bothered with new things. And that is very sad for them and the human race as a whole.