Leonardo Polo (February 1, 1926 – February 9, 2013) was a Spanish philosopher best known for his philosophical method called abandonment of the mental limit and for the philosophical implications of the application of this method.
This method of detecting the mental limit in conditions such that it can be abandoned, results in a rethinking of classical and modern themes that opens up a wide range of philosophical fields. Principal among these are: (1) the act of being of the physical universe (metaphysics); (2) the quadruple con-causality (or essence) of the physical universe (philosophy of nature); (3) the act of being of the human person (transcendental anthropology); (4) the manifestation of the human person through its essence (anthropology of the human essence).
In addition to this, his works cover a wide range of fields including psychology, neuroscience, philosophy of science, philosophy of language, social ethics, political economy and business theory.
Throughout his more than forty books, Polo engaged with both Classical and Medieval thinkers such as Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and William of Ockham, as well as Modern and Contemporary philosophers such as Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, and Nietzsche.
In dialogue with the great thinkers of the history of philosophy, Polo sought to further the achievements of traditional philosophy as well as rectify and correct the project of Modern philosophy.
Life
Early life (1926–1949)
Leonardo Polo was born in Madrid, February 1, 1926. He attended elementary school at the French High School (Liceo francés) of Madrid, and started his secondary education in Madrid, just as the Spanish Civil War was beginning in 1936. At this time, during the Spanish Civil War, his father held the position of Vice-mayor of the city. When the Republican government urged civilian to leave the capital city of Spain, Polo's family moved to Albacete, where he spent his first two years of secondary education. His father, a lawyer by profession, held the position of Chief Prosecutor for the city of Albacete from 1936 to 1937. At the end of the Spanish Civil War, the family returned to Madrid, except for his father, who was forced into exile, first to Nicaragua and then to Chile, where he died in 1946.
Upon the return of his family to Madrid, Leonardo Polo continued his secondary education at the Cardinal Cisneros Institute. However, the change of the 1934 plan of studies for that of 1938 forced him to repeat the second year of studies that he had already done in Albacete. During this period, he read the book Fundamental Philosophy by the Spanish philosopher Jaime Balmes. He was fifteen years old at the time. The basic idea that he drew from this work was of the importance of the first principles, that these could not just be one, and that philosophy must be understood from the point of view of these first principles (in a doctoral course about the Logos in 1995, he would say, "philosophy is the knowledge of principles by principles"). The importance given to the first principles then led him to the Summa Theologiae of Thomas Aquinas, and more specifically Question 45, which presents creation as an accidental relation. This led Polo think that Thomas Aquinas could be corrected and expanded on this point, since if creation has to do with what is first, if it is extra nihilum, if created act of being is being insofar as being, then the relation with the Creator cannot be an accident, but rather a relation of principles. Polo would later make numerous references to Aquinas in his works, especially with regard to the real distinction between essence and act of being and the need to expand this distinction and apply it to the study of the human person in what Polo would eventually call a transcendental anthropology.
At school he also read Ortega y Gasset, Aquinas, and Xavier Zubiri (including the first edition of Naturaleza, Historia y Dios published in 1942). In later years, Polo would also be able to attend lectures by Zubiri on the concept in Madrid and another by Ortega y Gasset on Toynbee.
After secondary school in 1945 and obtaining an extraordinary prize in the State exam, Polo decided to study law. This decision was influenced by family events. At the end of the Spanish Civil War, his uncle, Agustín Barrena, was left in charge of a law firm in which his father and his uncle Luis had once worked. A career in law offered him the opportunity of joining the firm with his uncle and to continue a family tradition, in spite of his own personal inclinations toward more theoretical subjects, and more concretely, toward he study of mathematics. Mathematics did not, however, seem to have much of a future in a country that had just come out of a civil war. For this reason, he studied law for four years.
Discovery of the mental limit and early philosophical studies (1952–1966)
In 1949, recently graduated, he started practicing law and, as he would later recount, he had to decide between making money by doing law (something which bored him) or to follow his inclinations toward theory and research. To his uncle's great disappointment, he chose the latter, and enrolled in doctoral courses of law. Of these courses, he remembers the one given by García Valdecasas, professor of civil law, with whom he held conversations about Hegel. Upon finishing his doctoral course work, Polo was faced with the choice of doing a doctoral dissertation, but also with the problem of how to make a living during those years dedicated to research. One possibility was to seek a teaching position; and he in fact prepared for a few professorial exams even though in the end he did not pursue them. The topic of research that interested him was the development of an existential interpretation of natural right. During this time his readings centered around Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Heidegger's Being and Time, Kant's Critique of the Practical Reason, Spinoza's Ethics, as well as a number of works by Aristotle and Leibniz. It was at this time that Polo began enrolling in classes of philosophy.
It was spring of 1950 when Polo became aware the existence of what he calls the mental limit. He describes detecting this limit in these terms:
“… it suddenly occurred to me, period. I was thinking about thinking and being, and about what being had to do with thinking; then I realized that we cannot arrive at being if one does not abandon the supposition of the object, because the supposition makes the object limited and a limited knowledge cannot be a knowledge of being if this is taken in the transcendental sense.” M.J. Franquet, "Trayectoria intelectual de Leonardo Polo,” Anuario Filosófico Vol. 29 no. 2 (1996): 305
In other words, to become aware of the mental limit of the need to abandon it is to notice that "one cannot separate, I repeat, being from being, it is not possible to take hold of it objectively because in this way it is "des-realized"; but if being is not real, it is nothing. The intentional consideration of being is a quid pro quo. Being agrees with itself, but, being known intentionaliter is, as the Scholastics would say, an extrinsic denomination. When I know the idea, I do not in any way affect what I know, because the idea of what I know is in my mind as intelligible in act and in reality as intelligible in potency. The real distinction between essence and being makes the question all the more serious, because if being and essence were the same, then knowing something of the essence would be knowing something of being."Interview with Prof. Dr. Juan Cruz in “Anuario Filosófico” XXV/1 (1992), § 47
Polo describes his discovering in this way: i) "A is A, supposes A", and ii) "Thought being does not think".
According to the first proposition, when we think A objectively (as an object of thought), there is no increase in the reality of A. Also, when we think A, we think A as an object of thought, because what is in the realm of the mind is A as an object. Thus, "A" is already thought, "A" is already given, there is already A. In other words, a mental operation always refers to an object, in which it stops. A consequence of this is that with an intellectual operation, I know A, but if I want to know more about A, I do not know more with the same operation. To know more about A or to know A better, I need a new mental act. I cannot increase the intellection of A with the same act by which I have already thought A. According to this understanding of mental operations, says Polo, the Kantian constructivism of mental objects, and the hegelian dialectic method are misguided attempts at explaining the object of thought.
The second sentence "Thought being does not think" explains a different meaning of the mental limit. While mental activity and objectivity are different, they are inseparable. Without the first one, there is no possibility of the second one: there is no way of finding an idea that could think itself. The intentionality of mental acts always refers to objects where it is impossible to find the known existence. This formulation involves a criticism to the subject-object identity, and a rectification of Heidegger's existentialism.
After two years of basic course work in philosophy, Polo received an opportunity to continue work in his research regarding the existential character of natural right with a research fellowship in Rome that he received from the Higher Council for Scientific Research (headed at that time by Alvaro D'Ors), which had just started a branch in Rome (the Spanish Juridical Institute in Rome). In Rome he had contact with eminent jurists like Del Vecchio and Capograssi. During these years in Rome (from the end of 1952 to September 1954), Leonardo Polo continued to develop the insight that he had received in 1950. A first phase of this involved the topic of his doctoral dissertation, "The Existential Character of Natural Right." However, posing the topic of the existential character of law required resolving a series of more fundamental questions, many of which were related to the intuition of 1950 and which became a long introduction that eventually became a work in itself and which would lead to his research away from the juridical sciences and more toward philosophy.
Polo spent these Roman years reading, thinking intensely, and, above all, writing. German philosophy, Kant and the German Romantics, as well as Hegel and Heidegger, whom he had already known in his younger years, were a major focus of his study during this time. A result of the activity in Rome is a large volume titled The Real Distinction, which he did not publish as such, but would later serve as a staging base for later publications.
The formulations that Leonardo Polo had made with regard to his 1950 intuition became more consistent through the intellectual dialogue with the Idealist philosophers and with Heidegger's existentialism. For example, Polo's reading of Heidegger and of his concern for the "existent", his critic of idealism and his philosophical approach, would lead Polo to his characterization of the human persons as "being additionally" [además]. This being additionally, which according to Polo Heidegger did not see, expresses that the human person is not limited to her thinking, nor even to her acting, but rather is additionally to thinking and action. To be additionally is "to open oneself intimately to be always constantly overflowing" (La libertad, doctoral course, Pamplona, 1990, pro manuscripto).