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Habituation and Hermeneutics: Toward a Thomistic Account of Pre‐Understanding
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
Abstract
Human existence entails that our encounter with the world is mediated by the context, historicity, and concrete particularities of that existence. Consequently, this situatedness, which contributes to our pre‐understanding, makes us more or less capable of “seeing” the truth of the world we encounter. The hermeneutical principle of pre‐understanding is sometimes presupposed to be ambivalent toward, if not in opposition to, traditional metaphysics. The present essay shows how traditional metaphysics, specifically of a Thomistic sort, need not be pitted against hermeneutics, but rather, offers the ground for understanding the way in which pre‐understanding, as our habituation into and connaturality with truth, and ultimately, God, is that means by which right interpretation is made possible.
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- Copyright © 2016 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 MacIntyre, Alasdair, “On Not Having the Last Word: Thoughts on Our Debts to Gadamer,” in Gadamer's Century: Essays in Honor of Hans‐Georg Gadamer, ed. Malpas, Jeff, Arnswald, Ulrich, and Kertscher, Jens (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002), 158Google Scholar. Hereafter, MacIntrye, “Last Word.”
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4 Ibid.
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11 See Aquinas, ScG, III, 18.5.
12 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I 16.5c. Hereafter, Aquinas, ST.
13 Aquinas, Thomas, On Truth, trans. Schmidt, Robert W. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1994)Google Scholar, 1.10c. Hereafter, Aquinas, De veritate.
14 Pinckaers, Servais, The Sources of Christian Ethics, trans. Noble, Mary Thomas (Washington: The Catholic University of America Press, 1995), 242Google Scholar. Hereafter, Pinckaers, Sources. Although what follows is largely a critique of this notion of freedom, this should not imply that I find the notion entirely lacking in value. The capacity to choose, to say yes or no, it seems to me, remains an important component of, if nothing else, an account of moral responsibility. The weakness, as discussed below, lay in its reductive understanding of freedom, which suggests that genuine freedom, which images the divine freedom, must be indifferent with respect to any given object. That is, it must be neither inclined nor habituated in such a way that the freedom to say yes or no is impinged. On such an account, a crucial aspect of human flourishing and human freedom is neglected. See below.
15 Quodlibetal Questions, I.16.1, IX.87, quoted in Aers, David, Salvation and Sin: Augustine, Langland, and Fourteenth‐Century Theology (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2009), 43Google Scholar.
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20 Ibid., 355.
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22 See the twin articles “The Eyes of Faith [I]” and “The Eyes of Faith [II],” as well as his “Answer to Two Attacks,” for a good discussion of Rousselot's interpretation of the act of faith. Each of these can be found in The Eyes of Faith, trans. Donceel, Joseph (New York: Fordham University Press, 1990)Google Scholar. Also, see “Spiritual Love and Apperceptive Synthesis,” “Being and Spirit,” “Thomist Metaphysics and Critique of Knowlede,” and “Remarks of the History of the Notion of Natural Faith,” for further discussions sympathetic intuitive knowing and the act of faith.
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25 Ibid.
26 Aquinas, ST, II‐II, q. 151, a. 2, co.
27 Aquinas, ST, II‐II, q. 151, a. 3, ad2.
28 Aquinas, ST, II‐II, q. 45, a. 2, co.