Continuous, Touching and Next; Reason and the Brain; One Substance and Immanent Activity

Orientation #

He says “we’ll come back to this when you go to the first and the third book on the soul,” and that separated souls’ lack of imagination “doesn’t come till next course.” The previous class introduced Physics VI as “the philosophy of the continuous” and began its opening lines; the next works through the definitions of continuous, touching and next and why a line is not composed of points.

The class, in order #

1. Continuous, touching, next — and thoughts (“Put two together, as we say”) #

Point: the three are ordered, and thoughts fall under none of the first two, which shows something about reason.

• Continuous vs. touching vs. next: continuous things have one common boundary (“the end of one is the beginning of the other”); touching things have two limits that are together; next things need not touch at all. Houses: Quebec row houses seem to share a wall or have touching walls; his houses in Shrewsbury are not even touching, yet “the next house” with nothing of the same kind between.
• Thoughts: “every mother is a woman, no man is a woman” — the next thought is “no man is a mother”; but these thoughts have no boundary, do not touch at a point, line or surface.
• Definition of square, “equilateral right-angled quadrilateral”: genus and differences meet at no common boundary, so the definition is not continuous, yet it makes a continuous thing known most perfectly.
• Argument:
  1. Reason knows a continuous thing in a non-continuous way (the definition).
  2. This cannot be due to the thing known, which is continuous.
  3. So it is due to the knower — “whatever is received is received according to the condition of the receiver.”
  4. Body is something continuous.
  5. Conclusion, “in the second figure”: reason is not a body.
• Aside: 30 students hear the same lecture and receive it differently, some with a jumbled imagination; that is why he prays, in his little prayer, for the angels to straighten our images (per Thomas).

2. The blow on the brain: organ or object? (“the light bulb is what the organ of sight”) #

Point: interference with an act does not show what is the organ; the brain is on the side of the object.

• Objection: a blow on the brain, or alcohol, interferes with thinking; a blow on the eye interferes with seeing and shows the eye is the organ; so the brain is the organ of thought.
• Reply by example: windowless room lit by one bulb; “whack!” the bulb and I no longer see you — is the bulb the organ of sight? Two ways to interfere with a power’s act: on the side of the organ or on the side of the object (you leaving the room; light belongs to the object of sight). The mere fact of interference “doesn’t tell you which it is.”
• If, by the separate argument from the continuous, reason is not a body, then the brain cannot be the organ of universal thought and must be on the side of the object.
• Aristotle on the proper object of reason: “the what it is of something you can sense or imagine,” as the object of the eye is the colour of something out there. Hence we do not think without an image (I picture a triangle to think what a triangle is), but the thinking is no more in the image than my seeing is in your clothes.
• Boethius, De Trinitate: no image of God in his divine nature, so we think of him negatively — incorporeal, simple (no parts, no composition), unmoved mover; angels “separated substance,” separated from matter. Negation still uses an image: to say God is not a body I have an image of a body and negate it.
• Student: is the brain the instrument of the rational soul in reasoning? Answer: “basically on the side of the object,” understood through the analogy: the black of your clothes is in your clothing, my seeing it is in my eye and power; “it’s very subtle.”
• Aside: a former student of his, in the three books about the soul, was convinced the brain is the organ of thought — “you pick up the news magazine and they’re right on the brain”; the light-bulb example broke the argument.

3. The logic of the objection: form and matter (“affirming the consequent”) #

Point: the brain argument fails either in form or in matter, and both must be avoided.

• Version 1: If the brain is the organ of thought, a blow on the brain interferes with thought; a blow does interfere; therefore the brain is the organ. Form defective — affirming the consequent (“same type that scientists come up with all the time with their theories”). An if-then asserts nothing as in fact so.
• Two kinds of counterexample: (a) A less universal than B — “if I am a dog, then I am an animal; I am an animal”; (b) an effect with more than one cause — “if Berquist dropped dead last night, he’ll be absent; he’s absent; therefore he dropped dead.” “That’s wishful thinking, but it’s not logical thinking.”
• Matter vs. form: form asks whether the conclusion follows necessarily; matter asks whether the premises are true, necessary or probable. If the form is bad, no need to examine the matter — but good matter makes the student apt to think it follows.
• Version 2, turned around: If a blow on the brain interferes with thinking, the brain is its organ; it does interfere; therefore. Form good (“if A then B; A; therefore B”), matter bad: the conditional is false, since interfering with the organ is not the only way to interfere with a power’s act (step around the corner and you don’t see me).
• So one speech has a defect of form, the other of matter; worst is both. Like calculating: a wrong number, or right numbers added wrongly.
• Aside: we borrow words from calculating (“add up,” “put two and two together”); counting is more known to us than defining and reasoning; Greek “syllogism” comes from “to calculate,” as in “I reckon that’s so.” [A remark here about “Aristotle talks like a fool” is unclear in recording.]

4. Being before doing: the soul’s existence not immersed in the body (“you have to be before you can do something”) #

Point: since universal understanding is not done in the body, the soul’s existence is not entirely in the body.

• Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am” goes from doing to being; that fits the third sense of before (the discourse of reason), but in the second sense (in being) being is before doing — one can be without two, not two without one; I can be without doing, not do without being.
• Aristotle, ninth book of wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics IX]: people say of what does not exist that they want it or think about it, but never that it moves; moving makes it clear things are.
• The soul’s existence is less known to us than what it does, so “we have to reason backwards, as Sherlock Holmes says.”
• Argument: if the soul’s existence were only “immersed in the body” (Thomas’s image, “like something underwater”), what it does would be only in and through the body; but understanding what a triangle is, the definition, is not in the body (one way to see this: the definition is not continuous); therefore its existence is not entirely in the body — the body does not fully share it.

5. Brain-mapping, universal and singular (“I just made a choice”) #

Point: the immateriality of reason shows in its knowing the universal, not in knowing the singular.

• Bob O’Gro on Canadian brain-mappers: stimulate an area, patient reports anger, chocolate, anguish; hard to pinpoint. Stimulating may yield an image of a triangle and so set you thinking of a triangle — you are imagining there, not thinking, “because they’re so closely tied.” He never found a spot where the subject said “I just made a choice,” and concluded the will is not in the brain: they reach the will’s immateriality before the reason’s — “sort of interesting.”
• Student: is understanding anything immaterial? Answer: senses and imagination know only the singular; reason’s immateriality is seen clearly only in its knowing the universal; reason knows the singular only by returning to the image, “coming back to the origin of its own thinking.”
• Another way to see it: to have many individuals of one kind (Euclid’s first theorem, two equal circles, one here, one there) involves part outside of part, i.e. the continuous, “whose parts are joined at a common boundary” (two semicircles; the diagonal dividing a parallelogram into equal parts). God, an angel, the separate soul have no part outside part. The universal separates what is common and abstracts from that individualizing, continuous character.
• Student: is thinking of a particular circle understanding? No — that is imagination; people confuse the inward senses with reason. “I just kind of put your appetite in here” for the soul course.

6. Thinking vs. imagining: Locke, Aristotle, false imagination (“Don’t get ideas”) #

Point: an image is never the thought, and confusing them breeds error.

• “Idea” in Locke and the English philosophers fuses thought and image: a flash of an idea should be a thought; “don’t get ideas” from your girlfriend means images.
• Locke on the general triangle, “a figure contained by three straight lines”: are the lines equal or unequal? Either answer fails (scalene vs. equilateral); he says “all and none,” an apparent contradiction; Berkeley: therefore no general ideas. Two faults: (1) he does not understand ability — the lines in the definition are able to be equal or unequal, actually neither; (2) he tries to imagine what should be understood — any two lines imagined are actually equal or unequal. Likewise I can picture only a white, black, yellow, red, brown (even green) man, male or female, but what a man is is common to all.
• Aristotle (De Anima III) distinguishes thinking from imagining starting from what is more known to us, not from universal vs. singular: I can imagine a terrorist with a Kalashnikov in the next room, but need a reason to think it; and if I think it I am afraid, if I imagine it I am not. Imagining winning the lottery vs. thinking I won (drinks for all).
• Contemporary preference: Disneyland’s “imagination is more important than knowledge.” Plato, “an opinion without a reason is an ugly thing” — a former colleague: “don’t pawn your uglies off on me.” Walk with his children: red ribbons on trees as Indian marks, until the youngest got really scared at some Quonset huts — imagination can seem very real.
• Student: do angels imagine? No, they know singulars but not through senses or imagination; separated souls have no imagination (“no novel” — “next course”).
• You cannot imagine a thought: it has no shape (circle, sphere, cube?). Danger of “false imagination”; Thomas on Boethius’ De Trinitate: in theology one ought not to resolve to the imagination — automatic deception.
• Aristotle: the Greeks all spoke of contraries in change (the Chinese Book of Changes and the moderns too), “forced on the mind by truth itself” — the perfection of reason is being forced; imagination keeps its freedom, fitting democratic worship of freedom. C. S. Lewis, surprised by a part of England, told by his uncle: “what right did you have to think that?”
• Student: is the brain the organ of imagination? Yes, part of the brain — the powers tied to the singular.

7. Touching in mathematics; is a man one substance? (“just a rearrangement of atoms and molecules”) #

Point: the mathematical difficulty about touching leads to the question whether a man is one substance.

• Student: two semicircles — can mathematics distinguish continuous from touching? Difficult; we say circles touch at a point, but the difference is not as clear as in the natural world; you cannot have two points unless one is here and one there. Quantum physics: no exact momentum and position together; Schrödinger: particles “blurred,” not identifiable individuals, in reality not only in our knowledge.
• The naive view of man as a collection of atoms — a mixture of many substances (Empedocles, Anaxagoras) — entails no birth or death, only mixture and separation: the funeral home a “separation,” a baby “a new mixture,” Bertrand Russell’s anti-atomic-war conferences, Burke’s black band, ashes on the ocean — “what’s the difference?”
• Do you treat yourself so? Losing an arm would be like part of Worcester disappearing. Subsidiarity (Aristotle, Politics II): a Holy Cross student beats an Assumption student, so we beat any Holy Cross student; Palestinian and Jew; if I hit you, must you hit back only my fist? Florida punished for Oregon, Spaniards for Frenchmen, Switzerland for Hitler’s Germans; Miss Havisham avenging herself on all men (Dickens, “our greatest English novelist”). A man has a unity Europe and Assumption College do not.

8. Immanent activity, one substance, substantial form (“remaining within the doer”) #

Point: activities that remain within the doer show a man is one substance, which grounds substantial change and the soul as substantial form.

• Lifting, pushing, pulling act on something outside; seeing, hearing, reasoning remain within (the Latin “immanent”). Seeing you does not affect you.
• Boys lift a Volkswagen onto a garage roof; tug-of-war: together we do what none could alone. But a painting half-curtained from each of us is not seen; a Mozart melody split note by note among hearers is not heard; premises split between two heads (“every mother is a woman” / “no man is a woman”) yield no syllogism; length known by one, width by the other, no area calculated. One and the same person must do the whole.
• If each atom were a distinct substance, there would be no seeing, hearing or reasoning. So there is substantial change; only then the distinction of first matter from the substances also called matter (a secondary sense), and substantial form.
• The soul is substantial form — Aristotle “the first man to really see that”; the Church at the Council of Vienne. Earlier notions: something accidental, like the organization of a house or the harmony of the body (Simmias in the Phaedo), or an angel imprisoned in the body; none saw something substantial yet not a complete substance. The recording ends here.

His words #

• continuous / touching / next: one common boundary; limits together; nothing of the kind between, no touching required.
• “the what it is of something sensed or imagined”: proper object of reason (Aristotle).
• organ vs. object: two sides from which a power’s act can be interfered with.
• affirming the consequent: from “if A then B” and B, inferring A — invalid form.
• form vs. matter of an argument: whether the conclusion follows necessarily vs. whether the premises are true/necessary.
• “ninth book of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics IX].
• second and third senses of before: in being; in the discourse of reason.
• “immersed in the body”: Thomas’s image for existence only in the body.
• ability: the lines of a general definition are able to be equal or unequal [ed.: potency].
• false imagination: trying to imagine what cannot be imagined.
• immanent activity: “remaining within the doer” (seeing, hearing, reasoning) vs. acting on something outside.
• first matter, substantial form, substantial change: as he uses them at the close.

Texts #

Read in class: none read verbatim. Mentioned: Aristotle, Physics VI (the continuous; inferred as the book under study); Aristotle, De Anima I–III (“three books about the soul”; Book III on reason vs. imagination); Aristotle, Metaphysics IX (“ninth book of wisdom”); Aristotle, Politics II (subsidiarity); Boethius, De Trinitate, with Thomas’s commentary; Plato, Phaedo (Simmias); Plato (the “ugly opinion” line, “Republic or not,” he is unsure); Euclid, Elements I.1; Descartes; Locke and Berkeley on the general triangle; the Chinese Book of Changes; C. S. Lewis; Dickens, Great Expectations; Council of Vienne.

His questions #

• Why does reason know a continuous thing in a non-continuous way — because of the thing known? No; the thing is continuous, so it must be due to the knower, which is not continuous.
• A blow on the brain interferes with thinking — is the brain therefore the organ of thought? Not necessarily: the light bulb shows interference can be on the side of the object.
• Is the brain the instrument of the rational soul in reasoning? It is basically on the side of the object, like the coloured thing to the eye.
• Is “if the brain is the organ, a blow interferes; it interferes; therefore” a good syllogism? No — affirming the consequent, a defect of form.
• Is understanding anything, not only the universal, immaterial? Reason’s immateriality is seen in its knowing the universal; senses and imagination know the singular.
• Can angels or separated souls imagine? No; angels know singulars without senses or imagination; separated souls have no imagination (next course).
• What shape do your thoughts have? None — a thought cannot be imagined.
• Is the brain the organ of imagination? Yes, part of the brain.
• Can you and I together see a painting, hear a melody, or syllogize, as we can together lift a Volkswagen? No; immanent activities must be in one and the same person.
• Is man one substance or a mixture of many? One substance, as immanent activities show; hence substantial change and substantial form.