Why Knowing the Soul Is Hard: How Natural Science Reasons, and the Phaedo's Two Views of the Soul

Orientation #

He says he will look at “the rest of this third part here next time” (the difficulties of the proemium). He refers back to “the three sciences that we spoke about before” (natural philosophy, mathematics, metaphysics) and to having mentioned before that sensing remains in the one sensing. Verified sources indicate the class reads from his handouts “The First Definition of Reason” and “Note for Book One of Natural Hearing, Reading I”, and matches Thomas’s commentary on Physics I, lectio 1. The previous class worked through the opening of the De Anima proemium and the next continues the proemium’s terms “nature”, “substance”, “what it is”.

The class, in order #

1. Contra Gentiles III 56: substance known through accidents (“No knowing power knows anything except”) #

Point: our understanding’s proper object is the what-it-is, yet outside mathematics we reach it only through sensible accidents.

1. No knowing power knows except by reason of its proper object (sight knows only as coloured).
2. The understanding’s proper object is the what-it-is, the substance of a thing (De Anima III, “we’ll see that when we get to the third book”).
3. So whatever the understanding knows, it knows through the substance; hence every demonstration of properties takes the what-it-is as principle (Posterior Analytics I). Geometry: from knowing right angle and triangle we come to know the interior angles equal two right angles.
4. But if the understanding knows some substances through accidents (De Anima I: “the accidents confer a great part to a knowledge of what it is”), this is per accidens, because our understanding arises from sense; so through sensible accidents we must arrive at substance — “this does not have place in mathematics but in natural things only”.

• Plane geometry vs. soul: triangle, circle, square are on the surface, known directly and first; the soul is not. We know colour and sound, then our sensing of them, and work back to the soul.
• Student objection: we know the soul not only through the senses but through inward experience, so perhaps we could start there. Reply: the early Greeks confused understanding with sense; Aristotle must first distinguish reason from sense (beginning of Book III). Dream: we confuse imagining with sensing, and awake we also confuse imagining with thinking (“imagine that’s so”, “I think that’s so”); the chorus in Henry V uses “thought” and “images” interchangeably. Words for thinking are borrowed from sense: “grasp” (touch), “taste”, “no judgment” (eye). Sense is more known to us; thinking vs. sensing is not hard to separate, thinking vs. imagining is harder. Locke calls image and thought alike “idea”, as the average person does.
• Aside: this movement from senses toward reason resembles wisdom, which goes toward the immaterial.

2. Boethius: natural philosophy proceeds rationabiliter (“rationabiliter, mathematics disciplinabiliter and wisdom intellectualiter”) #

Point: Thomas’s third sense of “rationabiliter” explains the way of natural science, and of the study of the soul.

• Boethius’s three: natural philosophy rationabiliter, mathematics disciplinabiliter, wisdom intellectualiter; Thomas has a whole article on each word.
• Three meanings of proceeding rationabiliter: (a) from something of reason studied in logic (genus, species, difference); (b) when something is reasonable but not known for sure; (c) in the way characteristic of the rational soul — the sense proper to natural science.
• The text read (third way): natural science serves the rational soul’s way in two things. First, as the soul goes from sensible things (more known to us) to understandable things (more known by nature), natural science proceeds from the more known to us and less known by nature (Physics I); demonstration by sign (always something sensible in its first meaning) or by effect is most used there. Second, since reason discourses from one thing to another, natural science most observes this: from effect to cause, and by demonstration through extrinsic causes proving one thing from another entirely outside it — not merely from animal to man. Hence natural science is “more conform to the understanding of man”; attributed to it not as to it alone but as doing it most of all.
• Shakespeare’s definition of reason contains “discourse” — Thomas’s second point; but discourse is from one thing to another thing, not just this to that in the mind.
• Thomas elsewhere gives four ways reason goes from one thing to another: cause to effect, more often effect to cause, like to like, opposite to opposite.
• Application to the soul: we start outward and go inward, and go from one to another: acts known through objects, powers through acts, soul through powers. Book One investigates the soul through powers, acts and objects; Book Two arrives at a general understanding of what the soul is, then studies the powers in detail to know plant, animal and understanding soul distinctly.
• “So you don’t simply misunderstand paragraph three”: that Aristotle treats the substance of the soul first and then its accidents (powers) does not mean the soul is more known than its powers — “that’s not true at all”.

3. First difficulty: is there one method for the what-it-is? (“some one method about everything”) #

Point: reading paragraph 4 — to grasp conviction about the soul is “in every way a most difficult task”.

• Since the question of substance is common to many things, there might seem to be one method for everything whose substance we seek, as demonstration is for properties; then that method must be sought. If there is no one common method, the task is harder: for each thing one must grasp its own way — demonstration, division, or another.
• Is the way of knowing what a triangle is the same as for the soul? The variety of Greek opinions shows one must stop and think; “a fortiori the moderns don’t even know if they have a soul”.

4. Second set: genus, act or ability, parts, one soul or many (“the principles of others are other”) #

Point: what would go inside the definition of the soul.

• The first thing in a definition is the genus: is the soul a “this something”, a substance, or a quality, quantity, or another? Phaedo: Socrates takes the soul as a substance distinct from the body and in it “like a sailor in a boat”; pre-Platonic Greeks took it as breath leaving at the last exhalation (the dying warrior whose soul a great wind forces back), still a substance; Simmias reports the soul as the harmony of the body — not a substance but a quality, an organization.
• Act vs. ability: “a very fundamental division that Plato introduced”; “this makes no small difference”.
• Divisible into parts or partless.
• Whether every soul is of the same species: people find “the soul of a dog”, a fortiori of a tree, quaint (choosing plants for the yard with his wife, each with its own soul); inquirers until now looked at the soul of man alone, and we have the same tendency.
• Is the account one, like that of animal, or different for horse, dog, man, God? Compare geometry: a definition of quadrilateral and of square, rhombus, oblong. Aristotle will give a general definition of soul and definitions of plant, animal and understanding soul.
• If not many souls but parts: whole first or parts? and parts first or their works (acts)? and acts first or their objects? Eating, food, the ability to eat, or the soul whereby we eat; reproducing, the ability to reproduce, or the reproduced.

5. Paragraph 6: definition and accidents manifest each other (“the accidents lead in great part”) #

Point: knowing the what-it-is helps know the accidents (mathematics), but the accidents lead to the what-it-is, “especially in natural science”.

• In mathematics knowing straight, curved, line, plane, parallel lines is necessary before the property of the triangle.
• Conversely, when we can account for all or most accidents according to the appearances we speak best about the substance, since the principle of all demonstration is the what-it-is; a definition from which no accident can be known or even conjectured is “dialectical and in a wholly empty way”.
• Euthyphro: do the gods approve it because pious, or is it pious because approved — nature or property? Likewise “the good is what all desire”: good because desired, or desired because good?
• Outside mathematics we know effects and accidents first: dog = four-footed animal that barks, cat that meows — the first distinction, but secondary.
• Comedy: “a play that makes you laugh”; laughter is an effect known before the substance. Aristotle’s part of the Poetics on comedy is lost, but he says the laughable is a form of the ugly that does not produce pain (comic mask; Red Skelton’s funny ugly face). The theatre masks smiling/weeping: the emotional effect is our starting point to investigate what tragedy and comedy are intrinsically; conversely, if the definition does not show why one makes us laugh and the other cry, we have not understood them. “It works both ways.”
• Summary of the difficulties in paragraphs 4-6: what way to investigate; what genus; one definition or many; whether definition manifests properties or vice versa.
• Thomas on the three parts of the proemium: the author makes the reader wish well (benevolent) by showing nobility, teachable/docile by showing the order, attentive by showing the difficulty — “beautiful explanation”.

6. The two probable Phaedo opinions and the whole truth (“two most probable opinions about what the soul is”) #

Point: each opinion has part of the truth; Aristotle in Book Two joins them.

• Opinion A: soul a complete immaterial substance distinct from the body. Opinion B: soul an accidental form, the harmony or order of the body.
• His puzzle: living vs. non-living body — different like the words “cat” and “dog” (made of different letters; the Greeks use one word for elements and letters, and Democritus says tragedy and comedy come from the same letters), or like “cat” and “cat” with something added that comes and goes (Plato’s soul entering and leaving; death as separation), or like the same letters rearranged? Protoplasm or DNA seem to be extra, but they break down into what is found in the non-living world — so the “most probable” opinion becomes mere arrangement. Piano tuning: nothing is added or leaves, the strings are ordered or disordered; rows of chairs the janitor straightens; death as disintegration of the body.
• Socrates’s arguments against harmony: the soul opposes the body (fasting, resisting passions), but would the harmony of the body oppose the body? There is a harmony of the soul, virtue — but is there a harmony of harmony, order of order? Recollection (the soul existed before the body). Later argument: an operation not in the body, understanding — then the soul cannot be simply the body’s order.
• Difficulty for the sailor view: no real connection; the one whose body is in pain and the one thinking how to relieve it would not be the same — contrary to inward experience (relieving my own pain has an urgency unlike being kind to you in pain; losing an arm, a tooth, feels like losing part of myself).
• Whole truth: neither a distinct complete substance nor simply an order, but the substantial form of the body — Aristotle brings both parts of truth together “for the first time”. Council of Vienne (as he recalls) adopted this; “it’s not true because the church adopted it; the church adopted it because it was true.”

7. Narrowed words: “soul” and “virtue”; mortal and immortal souls (“wealth is the virtue of money”) #

Point: jumping to the particular sense of a word causes problems.

• Student: “soul” no longer has the general meaning; people say a dog has no soul because not immortal.
• Same with virtue: Aristotle says wealth is the virtue of money; sharpness the virtue of a knife; the virtue of eye, ear (people now operated on so they see well without glasses). You must know the knife’s own act to see sharpness is its virtue, and know the virtue before knowing how it is acquired; proportionately for man. “How stupid” to be more interested in the virtue of your knife, pen or car than your own or your children’s.
• Thomas on the Platonists: all (or all animal) souls immortal — one extreme; the other, no souls immortal; the truth in the middle, hard to strike until you see both.

8. Through itself is before and cause of through another (“the through itself is before”) #

Point: a principle from Physics VIII, its Greek text, and its misuse by the self-motion theorists.

• Thomas applies it to vision of God: God sees himself through himself, and his understanding, understood and understander are one; all others depend on him to see him.
• Contra Gentiles has “prius et principium”; the Greek says “proteron … aition”, a variant “kai aition” (“and cause”), which makes more sense: before, as cause is before effect — and perhaps in being too (it can be without the other, not vice versa).
• Student links it to the motion arguments: the soul moves the body, so must be moved itself (nothing moves another unless moved); so it has an operation and existence by itself. Earlier thinkers made the soul fire or atoms moving themselves — but random atoms give no regularity (the cat would not go toward its prey rather than elsewhere).
• Aside on “before” and “beginning”: in the Metaphysics Aristotle distinguishes the senses of “before” by the common notion of beginning, but defines beginning by first, and first by before — so “before” is really before “beginning” in definition, though the wise man does everything in terms of beginning; he prefers to begin with the Categories text, which is more independent. Thomas’s “prius et principium” is a “double axiom”.

9. Inward experience; imagining vs. thinking (“free to imagine more or less than I want”) #

Point: answering a student’s request to say what inward as opposed to outward experience is.

• Touch is in a way the sense of the interior (stomach rumbling, inner pain); interior senses know sensing itself; I am aware of seeing, hearing, imagining, thinking in me, not in the world. Sensing remains in the one sensing (as opposed to pushing, kicking) — a stronger sign of life than moving. Brain waves and brain mapping do not show sensing; they must ask the man what he tastes or feels. Images are in the brain, yet we know images more by inward experience than by opening a head.
• First difference (Aristotle, Book III to come): I am free to imagine a bottle of champagne in there, or a terrorist outside with a machine gun, without reason; I cannot think it so without some reason (I saw him, the FBI tipped me). Second difference: imagining brings no strong emotion; thinking does (sweepstakes, best friend in his casket) — a manifestation by effect, not intrinsic.
• Having a reason fits Shakespeare’s “discourse”, the most known thing about reason: from the sound to the cat being there, sign to cause. Student: animals? “Something like that”, association, not really going from one to another. Student: pink elephant, unicorn — same thing.
• Greek: Aristotle calls it “dianoetike”, discourse, to know through another; Posterior Analytics: all dianoetic knowledge is through another, syllogism and induction.

10. Closing aside: nature and the unnatural in Shakespeare (“nature is what unites”) #

Point: parallel unjust brothers and daughters versus the natural. [The opening word is garbled: “let’s take Spartacus” — unclear in recording.]

• As You Like It: Frederick usurps the Duke (younger against older); Oliver wrongs Orlando (older against younger); the two daughters bonded; reconciliation in the woods, symbol of nature (“sermons in stones and books in brooks”): nature unites.
• King Lear: two of three daughters persecute the father, one of Gloucester’s two sons; Cordelia and Edgar the good; the contrast of natural and unnatural. Class ends here.

His words #

• “what senses” — the exterior senses; the understanding’s knowledge arises from them.
• “the what it is” — the substance, the understanding’s proper object.
• “per accidens” — the way substance is known through accidents.
• “rationabiliter / disciplinabiliter / intellectualiter” — Boethius’s modes of natural philosophy, mathematics, wisdom.
• “discourse” — from one thing to another thing; in Shakespeare’s definition of reason.
• “more known to us / more known by nature” — the two orders natural science moves between.
• “ability” — [ed.: potency]; “act, ability”, Plato’s fundamental division.
• “this something” — an individual substance (genus question).
• “sailor in a boat” — soul as substance in the body (Phaedo).
• “harmony of the body” — Simmias’s opinion; soul as order or accidental form.
• “the laughable” — a form of the ugly that does not produce pain.
• “dialectical and in a wholly empty way” — a definition yielding no knowledge of accidents.
• “benevolent, docile, attentive” — Thomas’s three aims of the proemium.
• “substantial form of the body” — Aristotle’s whole truth.
• “through itself is before and the cause of through another” — the Physics VIII principle; “prius et principium”; Greek “proteron”, “aition”, variant “kai aition”; “kath’ hauto”.
• “inward experience” — awareness of sensing, imagining, thinking in oneself.
• “dianoetike” — Aristotle’s name for the discursive part; to know through another.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles III, ch. 56 (Latin handed out, read in translation).
• Thomas Aquinas, commentary on Boethius’s De Trinitate, third sense of proceeding rationabiliter (Latin handed out).
• Aristotle, De Anima I, proemium, paragraphs 4-6 of his handout (from “to grasp some conviction about the soul” to the “dialectical … empty” definition).
• Handouts per verified sources: “The First Definition of Reason” and “Note for Book One of Natural Hearing, Reading I”.

Mentioned

• Aristotle, De Anima III (understanding’s object; distinction of imagining and thinking).
• Aristotle, Posterior Analytics I (what-it-is as principle; dianoetic knowledge through another).
• Aristotle, Physics I (more known to us); Physics VIII (through itself before through another).
• Aristotle, Metaphysics on senses of “before” (Book V inferred); Categories on “before”.
• Aristotle, Poetics (lost part on comedy; the laughable).
• Plato, Phaedo; Plato, Euthyphro.
• Thomas Aquinas, commentary on De Anima (the three parts of the proemium); Thomas on the Platonists and immortality.
• Shakespeare: Henry V (chorus), definition of reason with “discourse”, As You Like It, King Lear.
• Council of Vienne (as recalled); Locke’s “idea”; Democritus on letters.

His questions #

• Is there the same way of coming to know what a triangle is as knowing what the soul is? Left open as Aristotle’s first difficulty; if not, each thing’s own way must be found.
• Do the gods approve it because it is pious, or is it pious because they approve it? Is it good because we desire it, or do we desire it because it is good? Nature vs. property; outside mathematics we know the effect first.
• What is the difference between a living body and a non-living body — different letters, something added, or the same letters rearranged? Neither extreme; the soul is the substantial form of the body (Book Two).
• Wouldn’t the order of the body oppose the body? Is there a harmony of harmony? No — Socrates’s arguments against the harmony opinion.
• Is the soul in the body like a sailor in a boat? Then the one in pain and the one thinking to relieve it are not the same, against inward experience.
• Do we know the soul before we know its powers? “That’s not true at all”; the soul is known through its powers, acts and objects.
• Should I talk first about eating, or about food, or about the ability to eat, or the soul? Left open (Aristotle’s difficulty about whole, parts, acts, objects).
• Can I think there’s a bottle of champagne in there? Am I free to do that? No: I can imagine without reason, but cannot think so without some reason.
• Is “before” before “beginning” in definition? He maintains yes, since beginning is defined by first, first by before.