The Proemium of the De Anima: Why Knowledge of the Soul Is Most Desirable, and What 'Soul' Means

Orientation #

He begins directly at “the beginning here,” i.e. the proemium of De Anima Book I, and remarks that the class has already seen the proemia “to the wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics], the Nicomachean Ethics and the Natural Hearing (prev. lectures, as he recalls them). He points forward to “the rest of Book One,” “the second book” and “the third book” of the De Anima, and to “the ninth book of wisdom.” Note: the automated text-matching flagged a handout on Metaphysics VI, reading 4, but the transcript itself treats the De Anima proemium throughout, so the notes follow the transcript. The previous class introduced the De Anima within the order of Aristotle’s natural works; the next works through Aristotle’s opening difficulties of Book I.

The class, in order #

1. Proemium and tractatus (“the proemium prepares the mind”) #

Point: almost every work of Aristotle divides into a proemium and the main body (tractatus), and the proemium’s essential part is the scopus.

• Plato anticipates this in the Timaeus (more a treatise than a dialogue): Timaeus gives a proemium, then Socrates applauds it, then the discourse on the universe.
• Proemium: from the Greek, “paving the way.” Tractatus: from the Latin for drawing out. The proemium is to the work as the prologue is to Romeo and Juliet (most Shakespeare plays have none; that one does, short, preparing the reader).
• Essential content of a proemium: the scopus (target, what he is aiming at); sometimes also the importance, dignity, usefulness, desirability of the aim; sometimes the road or order to be followed.
• Thomas finds three parts in this proemium: (1) what is aimed at and its desirability, (2) the order of consideration, (3) the difficulty, which is in fact the longest part. Order of importance: first, then second, then third. In graduate school “we all tried to imitate this.”
• The proemium occupies the beginning of the first book, not the whole of it; compare the proemia already seen to the wisdom, the Nicomachean Ethics, and the first reading of the eight books of Natural Hearing.
• Dei Verbum: the Latin official text says proemium where an English translation says “introduction”; he calls it “one of the most beautiful proemiums I’ve ever seen.”
• “Introduction” etymologically means leading into (Introduction to Philosophy, to Politics: you are being led into the science); a proemium comes before that, letting you see what you will be into. Porphyry’s Isagoge is simply the Greek for “introduction”: introduction to Aristotle’s Categories and also to definition, division and demonstration; yet it has a magnificent proemium of its own, stating what he will treat (genus, difference, species, property, accident), why it is necessary (categories deal in genera and species; a species is defined by genus and difference; one kind of division is of a genus into species by differences; demonstration proves a property of a species through its definition), and how he will proceed, in a way proportioned to beginners, since logic is the beginning of philosophy.
• Student: is a foreword a proemium? Yes, loosely; Thomas’s prologus is much the same; “foreword” is not bad since a foreword is not an introduction.

2. All knowledge is good; knowledge versus love (“love of the bad is bad”) #

Point: reading the first sentence (“holding,” not “assuming,” that all knowledge is among things good and honorable), he adds “as such” and contrasts knowing with loving.

1. Knowledge as such is a perfection of the knower, a completion of his ability to know; so it is good.
2. Knowledge of the bad is good too, and it is the same knowledge as knowledge of the good: ethics knows virtue and vice; logic correct and incorrect reasoning; grammar correct and incorrect speech; medicine health and sickness, normal and abnormal blood pressure; Politics Book V how to conserve governments and how to overthrow them. Same knowledge of contraries. If knowledge of the bad were bad, all knowledge would be bad.
3. Why “as such”: a bad will can misuse knowledge, so accidentally the knowledge is bad (if I am going to shoot my wife, it is bad that I know what a gun is; poison; the sex-education objection: the information harms those whose appetite is not yet habituated, but it is the bad desires, not the knowledge as such, that are bad). Aristotle raises this in the Rhetoric: the master of persuasion can convict the innocent or free the guilty; the doctor can kill you; political knowledge can overthrow a good government; as strength is not bad as such though I can knock down an old lady with it.

• Contrast: love of the good is good, but love of the bad is bad. Reason: knowing puts the thing into the mind, where it exists according to the condition of the mind; love tends toward the thing as it is in itself. “That’s nice contrast there.”
• The Latin is more accurate than the English here: every knowledge is good, and not only good but honorable.

3. Two ways one knowledge is better than another (“either according to its certitude”) #

Point: one knowledge as such can excel another either by what is known or by how it is known.

• Reason for exactly two: in all our knowledge there is a distinction between what is known and how it is known; “certitude” names the second.
• Examples of a better object: seeing the sunset vs. the garbage; hearing Mozart vs. noise; tasting good wine vs. things he would not mention (aside: Scripture says vinum laetificat cor hominis, wine rejoices the heart of man; the French add “good wine”).
• Example of knowing the same thing better: everyone “knows” the Pythagorean theorem loosely, but one who has gone through Euclid Book I knows it far better than one who accepts it because the teachers say so.
• Aristotle will apply both criteria to the soul and find excellence in both ways.

4. Which criterion outweighs the other (“a glimpse of those we love”) #

Point: Aristotle does not say here, but Thomas’s commentary refers to Parts of Animals I, where knowing a better thing outweighs knowing a lesser thing better.

1. What is known pertains to the very substance of knowledge (knowledge is knowledge of something); how it is known is more like the quality of the knowledge, less substantial.
2. So the distinction simply / in some respect (secundum quid) applies: to know imperfectly what the soul is is better simply than to know perfectly what a triangle is; certitude wins only secundum quid.

• Aristotle’s comparison: a glimpse of those we love is better than a long view of those we do not. His versions: the nasty boss seen clearly all day vs. the girlfriend waving from the building across; a bad telephone line to someone loved vs. a long conversation with someone you do not care about; Mozart on a poor machine vs. a lousy piece on perfect equipment; Homer in translation (you lose in translation) is still better than most English authors in the original, Shakespeare being Homer’s only rival.
• Aristotle’s own case: the heavenly bodies are better than things down here, and he complains of scant evidence for them, yet it is better to know them imperfectly than to know perfectly the anatomy of dogs and cats around us.
• Thomas, Summa Contra Gentiles: to know something about God by faith alone is better than to know something else by demonstration, because of the better object.
• Wisdom must be knowledge both of the first cause and of the best thing; if the first cause is matter, which is not the best thing, “you got schizophrenia,” two different ends; the ninth book of wisdom will show how natural it is that the first cause is also the best.
• Applied to God: God is infinitely better than all other things together, so knowledge of God is infinitely more desirable than knowledge of all else. Augustine: miserable the man who knows all else but not God; blessed who knows God even if nothing else; blessed who knows God and other things, but not the more so for the other things. Hence lower things are studied for the sake of knowing God; Thomas: study the body to know the soul, the soul to know the angels, the angels to know God. Albert the Great (quoted in Kasurik’s translation of Physics I-II): to study other things for the sake of anything but knowing God, unless forced by necessity, is a perverse desire to know.
• Aside: King Lear’s “touch me with noble anger”; noble anger in Achilles, Ajax, Coriolanus, bound up with tragedy.

5. Both criteria applied to the soul (“I am sure that I have a soul”) #

Point: Aristotle puts the inquiry about the soul first on both counts: certitude and excellence of the thing known.

• Certitude: it is very difficult to get certitude about what the soul is, yet in some way knowledge of the soul is very certain, as even Descartes shows (“I think, therefore I am”): from inward experience (I sense, I desire, I think) one is very sure one has a soul, without the problems of the outward senses. I am more sure I am alive than that you are (a dead frog’s legs jump under electric shock; “maybe somebody’s moving you,” but I know I am moving myself).
• Excellence: not simply speaking (angels and God are better), but in the material world the living body is better than the non-living because of the soul, so the soul is the best thing in the whole material world.
• Why the Greeks never doubted the soul’s existence though they disagreed about what it is: the word “animal” comes from anima; “animate matter” means matter with a soul; animals rather than plants are named from soul because life is more manifest in animals, hidden in plants. And it was not the philosophers who named the animal so.
• Shakespeare inherits the same certainty: in Much Ado About Nothing (plot recounted: Hero denounced by the groom after Don John’s window trick; she faints; the friar reads her face and gives out that she has died) Beatrice tells Benedict she is as sure Hero is innocent “as that I have a soul,” the way we would say “as sure as two plus two is four.”
• Today: a “conspiracy” to remove “soul” from Bible translations at Mass (“my soul magnifies the Lord” becomes “my being proclaims”; “loss of his soul” becomes “loss of himself”); people asked whether they have a soul say “what’s that?” The Catechism keeps the word.
• De Koninck, “Introduction to the Study of the Soul” (written in French): the trouble lies in the word, not the nature; his Molière example, the man who discovers he has been speaking prose all his life. If we hear “soul” only in church, we think of the immortal, spiritual soul of man, which is not obvious.
• What the Greeks meant by psyche / anima: the first cause of life within living bodies. Reasons this makes the soul’s existence obvious: (1) everyone knows some bodies are alive and some not (the cat who visits his lectures vs. the stone); (2) everyone’s rough notion of life is self-motion: a kicked stone rolls but is not alive; a speck on the carpet that shoots off is a bug, not a thread; (3) self-motion means the cause of motion is within; that inner cause of life is what “soul” names. So that the soul is is obvious; what it is is not.

6. Usefulness of knowing the soul for all knowledge (“knowledge of the soul gathers great things”) #

Point: the second paragraph says knowledge of the soul contributes to every truth, most to nature; he unfolds this “a bit like Thomas does.”

• Ethics: ethics treats of happiness to be achieved by virtue; virtues are in the soul, in different powers. Cardinal virtues: foresight or prudence in reason, justice in the will, courage and moderation in two different kinds of emotion, all distinguished in the De Anima. Knowledge of the soul is to ethics as knowledge of the body is to the medical art.
• Logic: Thomas’s proemium to logic recalls Aristotle on the acts of reason in Book III of the De Anima, which logic directs; Albert the Great begins logic with the universal, quoting Boethius (a thing is singular as sensed, universal as understood), and the De Anima teaches that sense knows the singular, reason the universal.
• Wisdom: knowledge of the human soul is its starting point; until you know something immaterial can exist apart from body you cannot know there is a science of wisdom; and immaterial things (angels, God) have understanding and will, which we can only know by first knowing our own understanding and will and then the differences. Hence the gateway to all immaterial substances; Thomas’s body-soul-angels-God line again.
• Mathematics: you see in the mind the kind of separation from matter that takes place there.
• Theology: importance “very clear.”
• Proverbs (in his Bible at home; Hebrew hard to translate, every Bible differs): where there is no knowledge of the soul there is nothing good, then something like Friar Lawrence’s “wisely and slow; they stumble that run fast.”
• Why the word is dropped: people now do only experimental science, and the soul contributes little to that; National Review joke: what you do not think about hard enough becomes unthinkable.

7. Student question on the definition of the name (“that’s the definition of the name”) #

Point: a student asks whether “first cause of life within living bodies” is derived from the ancients’ words; he answers it is the definition of the name, what all of them understood by “soul,” on which they all agreed.

• The rest of Book I (not in the handout) shows how the predecessors investigated the soul through self-motion and through sensation, the two things by which animals manifest life: they move from place to place and they sense; the source of these two is where they looked.

8. Third paragraph: the order of proceeding (“nature and substance of the soul”) #

Point: after the scopus and desirability (paragraphs 1-2), paragraph 3 gives the order: first what the soul is, then its accidents.

• Plan of the work: rest of Book I, the ancients; Book II, the definition of the soul, then the powers shared with plants, then with animals; Book III, the powers unique to man.
• “Accidents” here is not opposed to “properties.” Some accidents are proper passions of the soul, some are in animals because of the soul: a hint at the difference between abilities in the soul and not in the body (understanding, choosing) and abilities in the body through the soul (digesting, growing, reproducing, even sensing). Student asks him to repeat this; he does, adding that this is only indicated here, to be proved later.

9. Paragraph five: soul, powers, acts, objects (“should you consider first the act or the object”) #

Point: jumping ahead, the third part (difficulty) asks the order in which four things are to be known: the soul, its powers or parts, their acts (works), and their objects.

• The questions as raised: soul or the ability to see first? the ability to see or seeing? seeing or colour? Raised as a difficulty in paragraph 5; determined later: acts known through objects, powers through acts, soul through powers.
• Reasons: seeing and hearing are both sensing and differ only by object (colour or light, sound); without knowing the difference of colour and sound you cannot know the difference of seeing and hearing. You would not know you had the ability to see unless you saw something; you find out whether you still have the ability to walk or to see when you get up in the morning.
• The apparent contradiction: paragraph 3 defines the soul before its powers, which might suggest the soul is more known to us than its powers; later he will argue the soul is immortal from the ability to understand, understanding known through what it knows. Resolution as he gives it: the ancients in Book I already went from operations (sensing, local motion) toward the soul; in Book II Aristotle defines the soul in a general way still from a general knowledge of acts and powers, and only then treats each power distinctly, gaining a more distinct knowledge of the kinds of soul (plant, animal, and “the understanding soul, as Shakespeare calls it”). The third paragraph “could be more explicit.”

His words #

• proemium; “paving the way”; the part before the main body, whose essential content is the scopus.
• tractatus; the main body, from “drawing out.”
• scopus; the target, what the author is aiming at.
• prologus; Thomas’s word, like a foreword, roughly the same as proemium.
• Isagoge; Greek for “introduction,” Porphyry’s title.
• Natural Hearing [ed.: Physics]; “the wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics].
• knowledge “as such”; knowledge considered as a perfection of the knower, apart from misuse by a bad will.
• what is known vs. how it is known; the two criteria of better knowledge; “certitude” names the second.
• simply vs. in some respect (secundum quid); what is known is better simply, certitude better secundum quid.
• soul (psyche, anima); as the Greeks understood the name: the first cause of life within living bodies.
• life; roughly, self-motion, motion whose cause is within.
• animate matter; living matter, matter having a soul.
• abilities [ed.: powers/potencies]; the powers of the soul, some in the soul alone, some in the body through the soul.
• proper passions of the soul vs. accidents in animals because of the soul; his gloss: abilities in the soul alone (understanding, choosing) vs. abilities in the body through the soul.
• “the understanding soul”; his Shakespearean name for the rational soul.
• vinum laetificat cor hominis; wine rejoices the heart of man.

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, De Anima I, proemium, paragraphs 1, 2, 3 and 5 of the handout translation (read and re-translated, with the Latin noted as more accurate at the opening).
• Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on De Anima, proemium (three parts; which criterion is more important, referring to Parts of Animals).

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Parts of Animals I (a glimpse of those we love; heavenly bodies vs. animals).
• Aristotle, Rhetoric (misuse of the art of persuasion); Politics V (conserving and overthrowing governments); Nicomachean Ethics (proemium; virtues); Natural Hearing, first reading of the eight books; “the wisdom” proemium and its ninth book; De Anima III (acts of reason).
• Plato, Timaeus (proemium).
• Porphyry, Isagoge (proemium).
• Euclid, Elements I (Pythagorean theorem).
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles (faith about God vs. demonstration of other things); proemium to his logic [ed.: Posterior Analytics commentary, inferred].
• Albert the Great (on studying for the sake of knowing God, quoted in Kasurik’s translation of Physics I-II; beginning of his logic on the universal, quoting Boethius).
• Augustine (miserable the man who knows all but not God).
• Descartes (“I think, therefore I am”).
• Charles De Koninck, “Introduction to the Study of the Soul” (Molière’s prose-speaker).
• Vatican II, Dei Verbum (Latin proemium); Catechism of the Catholic Church.
• Scripture: Psalm on wine (vinum laetificat cor hominis); Proverbs verse on knowledge of the soul; Magnificat and “loss of his soul” in current translations.
• Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet (prologue; Friar Lawrence’s “wisely and slow”); King Lear (“noble anger”); Much Ado About Nothing (Beatrice’s “as that I have a soul”); Coriolanus.
• Homer; Sophocles’ Ajax.

His questions #

• What are the two parts into which almost everything Aristotle wrote is divided? Proemium and tractatus, the proemium being to the work as the prologue to Romeo and Juliet.
• What does proemium come from in Greek? “Paving the way.”
• Why say all knowledge “as such” is good? Because knowledge is a perfection of the knower; knowledge of the bad is the same knowledge as of the good and is good; only a bad will makes it accidentally bad.
• Can you say love of the bad is good? No: love of the bad is bad, since love tends to the thing as it is in itself, while knowledge puts the thing in the mind.
• Which of the two criteria is more important, knowing a better thing or knowing a lesser thing better? What is known, simply; certitude only in some respect (Thomas, from Parts of Animals I).
• Is anything in the material world better than the soul? No: the living body is better than the non-living because of the soul, so the soul is the best thing in the material world.
• What did the Greeks understand by the word soul, so that they never doubted its existence? The first cause of life within living bodies, life being taken as self-motion.
• Why do we call the bug alive and not the kicked stone? Because the bug seems to move itself; the cause of its motion is within.
• Is seeing the same thing as hearing? What’s the difference? Both are sensing; they differ by object, colour vs. sound, so objects must be known before acts.
• How can Aristotle define the soul before treating its powers, if the soul is known through its powers? He defines it in Book II only in a general way from a general knowledge of acts and powers, then knows it more distinctly by treating each power in particular.