Senses of Before and After, and the Eight Senses of 'In' as Ways of Thinking Out

Orientation #

He says of last time: “I forget how far we got into the second act last time… We just started.” He looks ahead: thinking out conclusions belongs to “the logic of the third act.” The previous class closed with the three acts of the mind and their kinds of speech; the next takes up the logic of the second act in order (distinction, division, definition, statement, conclusion).

The class, in order #

1. Opening: angels in prophecy, Mary as the atmosphere (“do the angels help in prophecy”) #

Reading Thomas on the Sentences about prophecy: two things are involved — the prophet’s imagination is stirred (angels can do that) and a light from God to judge; the angel “helps to proportion that light to us,” as a higher angel enlightens a lower one through an intermediate rank more proportioned to him. Reminds him of Hopkins on the Virgin Mary compared to the air we breathe: without the atmosphere the sun would burn us; it “leaves his light sifted to suit our sight.”

2. One knowledge better than another: which senses of before? (“all knowledge is such as good”) #

Point: Aristotle’s opening of the dianima [ed.: De Anima] uses two senses of before and after.

1. All knowledge is good, but one knowledge is better than another (knowledge of soul better than of body; of angels better than of soul; of God better than of angels) — before/after in the fourth sense (better/worse).
2. Asking why one knowledge is better — because it is of a better thing — is looking before and after in the sense of cause and effect. “When you ask why, you’re looking before in the sense of cause”; seeking the effect of a cause is looking after.
3. He counts five chief senses but four central senses in order; the fifth (cause/effect) “lays alongside” and is attached especially to the second sense by proximity, yet is different. It is striking that this “afterthought” sense is the one used to see why one knowledge is before another. A student suggests the third sense too (must know lesser good before greater); he accepts it but says cause/effect is “more directly” the one. Aside: should you study the soul before the angels? Many great authors call the soul the doorway to the immaterial; to see that, you again look before and after as cause and effect.

3. Confused before distinct (“confused knowledge is before distinct knowledge”) #

Distinction: in the fourth sense, distinct knowledge is before confused (more perfect); in the third sense, confused is before distinct — a distinction moves from confusion to distinctness. Aristotle in the proemium to the eight books of Natural Hearing (“which I insist upon calling correctly … but they call it the Physics”) shows by examples that we know confusedly before distinctly, both in sense and in reason:

• a beautiful girl: it takes a while to know her distinctly (sense);
• the last movement of the Jupiter symphony: only when Warren Murray tells you four or five melodies are combined do you know its form (sense);
• we name a thing before we define it (reason) — comic strip: “That’s a big word. You sure you know what it means?” People love and don’t know what they mean by love. Asking why both sense and reason know confusedly first is again the fifth sense (cause). If distinct came first we wouldn’t have to look for distinctions and Thomas wouldn’t be making them all the time.

4. Ability rather than power; abilities distinguished by act and object (“the abilities of the soul”) #

He prefers “ability” to “power” (he even shortened Shakespeare’s “capability” to “ability”) because there is a distinction:

• active ability vs. passive/undergoing ability: the carpenter was able to make the table; the wood was able to be formed. Aristotle: the active sense is the first sense — we see the cellist’s or pianist’s ability, not the piano’s; yet the piano is able to be played. Daily English uses “-able” for undergoing too: burnable, breakable, beatable, buildable, destructible. “Power” (and even “potency,” which Thomas uses all the time) is “stuck on the first meaning.” Aristotle: there must be a connection between abilities, their acts and their objects; abilities are distinguished by their acts (seeing vs. hearing), and acts by their objects (sensing sound vs. sensing color/light) — so basically by their object. Book Nine of Wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics] is given to this: its first two parts distinguish the senses of ability and the senses of act. Relation between ability and object: relations are based on quantity or on acting-upon/undergoing, so this connection is one of acting/undergoing, one way or the other. Aristotle’s order in the soul goes from general to particular (because from confused to distinct): first the plant abilities shared with animals (nourish, grow, reproduce) — active; then the five senses — undergoing (sound acts on the ear, wrong music can deafen; light on the eye, the man blinded in the Spanish Civil War by light shining constantly); then understanding — both. Aside: brother Mark in a California wine-tasting room could not name the grapes in the blend at first — confused knowledge; the vintner sent him to the back room to taste the combinations.

5. The cause: from ability to act (“Big news”) #

Argument (student’s suggestion, adopted):

1. Sensing is an undergoing, a going from ability to act; understanding, as far as the undergoing understanding goes, is also.
2. Confused knowledge lies between not knowing at all and knowing distinctly: actuality compared to ignorance, still in some way ability compared to distinct knowledge.
3. So what goes from ability to act naturally knows confusedly before distinctly. “Big news” — you see one before-and-after because you saw another (cause and effect). “Beautiful, beautiful.”

6. Thinking about before thinking out; outward before inward (“think about something before you think out”) #

De Koninck at Laval (courses on Books I, II, motion, place, time of Natural Hearing) said “every respectable word in philosophy is equivocal by reason” and loved the eight senses of in, which come in Book IV on place. In the text as it comes down, Aristotle does not order them as he orders “beginning,” “end” in Book V of Wisdom; Thomas orders them Aristotle’s way — take the most known meaning, order the rest by connection to it, one by one — giving eight chief or central senses (others attach to the sides). English: you think about something before you think it out. Partridge’s Origins (recommended by a linguist): “about” originally means outside. So we know things in an outward way before inwardly; thinking out brings out what is in the thing. This is another universal before-and-after, similar to but different from confused/distinct:

• confused before distinct holds of sense in itself and reason in itself (both go from ability to act);
• outward before inward is because we sense singulars first and only then abstract the essence — Heraclitus: “nature loves to hide,” nature being a cause within, and what is within is hidden to what starts with the senses. Thomas’s etymology: intelligere = intus legere, to read within. The catechism definition “an outward sign instituted by Christ to give grace”: outward = sensible. So the senses of thinking out follow the senses of in (the opposite of out): “at least six of those eight.”

7. The eight senses of “in” (“what’s the first sense of to be in”) #

1. In a place: I am in this room. The Greeks so taken with this that whatever is must be somewhere — hence “where is God?” is a problem.
2. Part in a composed whole: my teeth in my mouth (not false teeth) vs. you in this room — you are not part of the room; a knocked-out tooth is then in the mouth as in a place. Closest to the first.
3. Genus in the species (with difference attached): genus and differences are parts of the definition — a different whole/part than sense 2.
4. Species in the genus — the universal whole. Objection: the wine is in the bottle, not the bottle in the wine; food in my mouth, not my mouth in the food — how can genus and species be in each other? Reply: only if “in” had one sense; it is equivocal by reason. Senses 2 and 3 are part in a composed whole (the one first known, the other the mental whole of definition).
5. Form in matter — Greek eidos is both species and form, so this follows.
6. Whole in the parts: the visitor shown all the buildings of Oxford/Duke asks “but where’s the university?”; the same for Assumption. Matter is “that from which something comes to be, existing in it,” and the whole comes from parts, so whole:parts is like form:matter. Boundary: in senses 2–3 the part is actually in the whole; in 5–6 the form is in matter, the whole in the parts, only in ability — the cook’s ingredients: dinner is in them in ability.
7. In the active ability (efficient cause): “I’ve got you in my power,” “it’s out of my hands”; the baby in his mother and father — they have the ability to produce it (at least its body).
8. In the end (the other extrinsic cause): “I left my heart in San Francisco,” “my heart’s not in it”; the philosopher’s heart is in wisdom, the lover of God’s in God. Count: he counts “one, two … eight”; the list above gives eight.

8. The senses of “thinking out” (“how many senses are there of thinking out”) #

Matched to the senses of in (at least six):

• Thinking out a division (sense 2): division is a distinction of the parts of a whole. Aristotle thought out the plot as beginning, middle, end, and as tying and untying knots; anatomy thinks out the parts of a body; spelling thinks out parts of a word (his spelling-bee story: “exercise”).
• Thinking out a definition (sense 3): the definition composed of genus and one or more differences; in a way also thinking out the parts, but “you’re thinking out the definition of the thing being defined” — division is not the same as definition.
• Thinking out the division of a universal whole (sense 4): Aristotle — drama into tragedy and comedy; Berquist — Shakespeare’s four kinds (tragedy, comedy, the love-and-friendship play, the mercy-and-forgiveness play); the chapter on quantity — every quantity has parts, sometimes meeting somewhere, sometimes nowhere, so discrete and continuous; Porphyry thinking out the definition of genus (an example of definition).
• Thinking out the order of something (sense 5, form/matter): Aristotle thought out the order of the senses of before and after; the order of the parts of a play.
• Thinking out the whole from the parts (sense 6): a student offers induction (“interesting”); his own example from the logic of the second act — having thought out what a square, a quadrilateral, a circle are (parts of statements), it dawns on you: “a square is a quadrilateral,” “a square is not a circle,” and the axiom “a whole is more than one of its parts.” “May not be the only example.”
• Thinking out a conclusion (sense 7): the conclusion is not a premise (“it is so because it is so” would be bad) — every mother is a woman, no man is a woman, so no man is a mother; the conclusion is in the premises not as a part but as children are in their parents: his wedding book ends with eighteen grandchildren who were “in our ability” — “if you cut us open you wouldn’t have found a baby.”
• Thinking out the means to an end (sense 8, “in parenthesis”): “I’m not sure that’s exactly the sense, but sort of likeness” — you want a Manhattan, you need whiskey and… He leaves senses 1 and 8 doubtful (“I don’t know about these last two”).

9. Where does thinking out the meanings of a word belong? (“think out the meanings of a word”) #

If words were not equivocal by reason we could hardly talk beyond our surroundings; Aristotle thought out the meanings of words used everywhere, especially in wisdom. Thomas uses the senses of before to show God the Father is not before God the Son, and the senses of opposite to discover how the persons are distinct — the end of all knowledge is to contemplate the Trinity. Contrast: a doctoral thesis on Marx at Laval — dialectical materialism (going back to Hegel) makes everything develop by a war of opposites, yet Marx nowhere distinguishes the senses of opposite. Someone might reduce it to sense 4 (species in genus), by a likeness: the genus is said of each species, the word said of each meaning. He wonders whether it is rather like being in place: anything can go in a box (junk, gold bars, money in a mattress); “what’s in a name?” — a young lady philosopher in the Laval Tribune, quoting Shakespeare, said there are many things in a name, and such a name is equivocal, so the name is like a place where many things are. Names are arbitrary (chien/dog; sophia/sapientia/wisdom), signifying by custom, accident, even choice — as it is accidental what you put in a room (a study becomes a bedroom). A genus, by contrast, signifies in general what each species is (animal: dog, cat, horse) — “a name said with one meaning of many things other in kind, signifying what it is.” So thinking out the meanings of a word seems different from all these; thinking out the order of the meanings might go under order. Warren Murray, on the phone today, was unsure whether it goes with place. Left open.

His words #

• “fourth sense” of before and after: the better before the worse.
• “third sense”: order in knowledge (confused before distinct).
• “fifth sense” / cause and effect: not one of the four central senses; “lays alongside” the second.
• “Natural Hearing” [ed.: Physics]; “Wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics]; “dianima” [ed.: De Anima].
• “ability” [ed.: potency/power]: active ability vs. undergoing (passive) ability; he shortens Shakespeare’s “capability.”
• “equivocal by reason” (De Koninck): every respectable word in philosophy.
• “eight chief/central senses of in”: others “attached to the sides.”
• “thinking about” (about = outside) before “thinking out.”
• “outward way / inward way”: senses know outwardly, reason inwardly; intelligere = intus legere, to read within.
• “composed whole” vs. “universal whole.”
• “division”: a distinction of the parts of some whole.
• “second act” / “third act of reasoning”: the logic of statement / of conclusion.

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle (as ordered by Thomas), Natural Hearing [Physics] Book IV: the eight senses of “in.”
• Aristotle, On the Soul, opening: all knowledge is good, one better than another (recounted from last night’s class).

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Natural Hearing Book I, proemium: confused before distinct.
• Aristotle, Wisdom [Metaphysics] Book IX (ability and act); Book V (ordering “beginning,” “end”).
• Aristotle, Categories, chapter on quantity; Poetics (plot: beginning, middle, end; tying/untying) (inferred).
• Porphyry: the definition of genus.
• Thomas on the Sentences: angels and prophecy (inferred locus); Thomas on intelligere; Thomas on the senses of “before” and “opposite” for the Trinity (“those little passages,” prev. classes).
• Hopkins on the Virgin Mary compared to the air we breathe; Heraclitus, “nature loves to hide”; Partridge, Origins; Shakespeare, “what’s in a name”; a Laval doctoral thesis on Marx.

His questions #

• In what senses are you looking before and after when you say one knowledge is better than another, and why? The fourth sense (better), and cause and effect (the fifth sense) when you ask why.
• Is confused knowledge before distinct knowledge? Yes in the third sense; in the fourth sense distinct is before confused.
• Why do both sense and reason know things confusedly before distinctly? Because both go from ability to act, and confused knowledge is act relative to ignorance but ability relative to distinct knowledge.
• Is the plant ability active or undergoing? the senses? understanding? Active; undergoing; both.
• Are my teeth in my mouth in the same way you are in this room? No — as part in a composed whole, not in a place.
• How can the genus be in the species and the species in the genus? Because “in” is equivocal by reason: different senses.
• Is the conclusion a part of the argument, one of the premises? No; it is in the premises as in an active ability, like children in their parents.
• Which sense of “in” does thinking out the meanings of a word correspond to? Left open — perhaps like being in place, not species in genus.