Jacques Maritain, Maurice Blondel, and the Ends of Art

This article reconsiders Jacques Maritain's philosophical poetics by situating it within his longstanding debate with Maurice Blondel over the nature and unity of intellect. I argue that Maritain's influential defence of artistic autonomy, first articulated in Art et scolastique (1920), is ultimately unsound. Although Maritain defines art as an autonomous intellectual habitus ordered exclusively to the good of the work, he secures this autonomy by denying artistic making any intrinsic orientation toward the ultimate ends of human action. As a result, the integration of art with moral, political, and religious life can occur only extrinsically. Reading Maritain against the political horizon of his association in the 1920s with Action Française, I contend that this appeal to hierarchical regulation is not a contingent political misuse of his theory but reveals a deeper antinomy within his account of autonomy itself. To further highlight this problem, the article's central section reconstructs Blondel's critique of Maritain's theory of intellect. Blondel's alternative account of “real knowledge” understands diverse intellectual activities as internally unified through an immanent orientation toward action, thereby exposing the compartmentalisation of intellect and being as the source of Maritain's difficulty. Although Blondel never developed a systematic philosophy of art, his neglected reflections on this topic disclose artistic making as a genuine mode of real knowledge, integrating poiēsis within the dynamism of intellectual life as a whole. The final section turns to Maritain's later theory of “poetic knowledge,” read here against Blondel's account of real knowledge, in order to expose strains that persist in Maritain's mature position despite its genuine innovations. I show that even where Maritain newly acknowledges, in language noticeably reminiscent of Blondel's, an immanent exigency toward exteriorisation native to intellect, he remains committed to the same divisions that organised Art et scolastique , now defended in terms of a tragic anthropology. The article concludes that Maritain's mature poetics represents a genuine advance, yet one that does not resolve the original antinomy, and that Blondel's philosophy of action offers a more coherent account of what Rowan Williams has called the “unavoidably theological element to all artistic labour.”