Two Abilities and Two Acts: Knowing, Learning and the Senses (De Anima II.5, Part 2)

Orientation #

He begins by saying that “in what follows now” Aristotle distinguishes two abilities and two acts in reason in order to manifest the double ability and double act in sense; he recalls “before” having explained paschein / “suffering” as stuck on its first meaning in English, and the Empedocles point that the senses are in ability (prev. lecture). At the end he says the proper place to clarify universals and understanding “will come in turn” when Aristotle takes up the understanding. Verified sources list a handout page (“An Exposition of Hamlet’s Exhortation to Use Reason”, p. 42) and DHB Vol. III p. 729; the transcript itself never mentions Hamlet. Last time treated the opening of II.5 (sensing as being acted upon, paschein/dunamis/aisthesis, Empedocles); next time turns to II.6 on the three kinds of sensible.

The class, in order #

1. The unusual order of proceeding (“Aristotle does something very unusual”) #

Point: Aristotle will manifest the two ways of being an ability and two ways of being an act in the senses by the way reason is in ability and in act — the reverse of the usual direction.

• Normally the sensible is more known to us than the understandable, and we carry words from the senses to the understanding.
• He promises to come back afterwards and ask why this particular thing is more known in reason than in sense (answered in §10 below).

2. Names carried from sense to understanding (“I see through the blind man”) #

Point: the words for acts of reason are taken from sensible things.

• “to see” for “to understand”: his mother’s saying “I see, said the blind man, but he couldn’t see at all”; “beatific vision” is a vision of the understanding.
• “grasp”: Thomas says the first act of reason is simple grasping; “grasp” first names the act of the hand.
• “understand” comes from “stand under.”
• General rule: we first name what we can sense (the only things we can point to in the beginning), then carry the word over with a connected but different meaning to what we cannot sense.

3. What “understanding” means (“to know what is said to stand under”) #

Point: to understand is to know what is said to stand under another, or to know a thing through what stands under it.

• Understanding a word: the name is “placed upon” the thing (Latin impositio nominis; the Greeks already spoke of placing a name upon a thing), so the thing/meaning stands under the name. Contrast with sense: hearing the Pope speak Spanish or Polish, you hear the sounds but do not know what stands under them; to misunderstand is to miss what stands under the word and get something else (students’ papers; misunderstanding on purpose for fun).
• Understanding an effect = knowing its cause: we say “underlying cause”; the native English word for cause is “ground.” Shakespeare puns on it at Juliet’s tomb (“we see the ground whereon these woes do lie, but the true ground … cannot without further circumstance decay” — Berquist attributes the line to the night watchmen scene). This is “the main meaning of understanding.”
• Understanding the substance: “substance” has the same etymology as “understand.” Two main meanings: what a thing is; a thing existing not in another. Reason knows what a thing is; the senses know only quantity and quality. Aristotle: if being were a house, substance would be its foundation.
• “Before you try to understand anything else, you have to understand what understanding is.”

4. The second road of philosophy (“What road do we always follow in philosophy”) #

Point: besides the road from senses into reason, philosophy follows the road from reasonable guesses toward reasoned-out knowledge.

• Example: book one of Natural Hearing goes through the guesses of the first philosophers about change, then begins a reasoned-out knowledge (prev. class matter, “go back there”). De Anima I after the proemium does the same with the predecessors’ opinions on the soul.
• Alternative statement: the road from thinking about things to understanding them (what and why they are).
• The word “understanding” itself shows the first road: what pertains to the understanding is manifested by the senses, “and not vice versa.”

5. Grasping the centre of the desk (“can I grasp the center of this desk”) #

Point: how a teacher normally leads by the hand from sense to reason.

• He can grasp the glass, not the centre of the desk: to grasp with the hand you must separate the thing from others (cut it out; water gives way). Likewise to grasp with reason you must separate what you grasp from everything else.
• Latin manuductio, being led by the hand (Monsignor Dionne always lectured on what Thomas means by it).
• But here Aristotle does the reverse: manifests something about the senses by something in reason.

6. §176: two abilities and two acts in “knowing” (“Man is knowing”) #

Point: “knowing” here is episteme, scientific knowing; a man is called knowing in two ways, and is potential in two ways.

• (a) Man is knowing because he is the kind of thing that can learn (the “matter” is such — Aristotle uses “matter” without yet having shown the mind is not material; the mind is like matter in being able to be formed by a science). (b) The one who already has grammar is knowing because he can consider when he wishes, if nothing outside prevents. (c) The one actually considering is knowing in actuality and “properly.”
• Slave boy (Socrates): asked for the side of a double square he answers “double the side” — a reasonable but mistaken guess. First conversation: doubling the side gives a square four times as big. Second conversation: the square on the diagonal, shown as half of the four-square figure, is exactly twice as big (Pythagorean theorem would be too hard for him). So: he was able to acquire this part of geometry; having acquired it he does not think of it all day, but can recall it in another conversation.
• Result: two abilities (to acquire the science; to think about it once acquired) and two acts (possessing the science, an actuality of the first ability; actually thinking, “the complete and full and perfect act”).
• “Nothing outside prevents”: noise, too much wine, being tired. Once you have it, thinking of the known is easy and pleasant; before, “a real struggle.”
• Aristotle’s concern here is not understanding understanding but manifesting sensing.

7. §177: two ways of going from ability to act (“the one is altered through learning”) #

Point: learning looks like alteration; considering what one already has is rather an increase into itself.

• Learning appears like alteration especially when one goes from the contrary state — the slave boy was mistaken, not merely ignorant, so he goes from false thinking to true, like hard to soft, hot to cold (change between contraries, as in natural philosophy). But, as Thomas points out, being mistaken first is accidental to coming to know; being soft first is not accidental to becoming hard.
• English “change” is used mostly for going from the contrary: taught a theorem on which you had no opinion, you did not “change your thinking.” Aside: colleague in the hall — you can do more with students’ minds than with other professors’, since professors have false opinions that must be changed.
• Going from having a theorem to showing it at the board: no one would call that changing one’s thinking; it is “becoming more actual in what I already possess,” an increase in the same thing (Greek epidosis), a perfecting rather than an altering of nature. He would not use “changes” in the translation of this clause because “change” suggests the contrary.

8. §§178–179: undergoing is not simple (“neither is suffering simple”) #

Point: paschein (his translation “suffering”; better “undergoing”) has two senses.

• (i) a destruction by the contrary (“being under the weather”); (ii) the saving of a being in potency by a being in act, by something similar, as potency is to actuality — a perfecting, “more the same.”
• So the one with knowledge coming to consider “is either not altering, for the progress is into itself” — habitual knowledge is a middle state between potency and act, and thinking is “a flowering of my habit.”
• Not proper to say the judge is altered when he judges, nor the housebuilder when he builds, nor (his) the cook when he starts dinner.
• Leading into actuality from potency by understanding and judging is not teaching but needs a different name. Going from mistake/ignorance to possessing geometry is being taught; actually thinking what one has is not learning.
• Aside on teachers: one teaches what one knows; insofar as a man learns what he teaches, he is not yet fully a teacher. Teaching Euclid I year after year he learns nothing, but each day becomes actual regarding a new theorem (theorem one, theorem two…) — “don’t call it learning, Aristotle.”

9. §180: two modes of alteration; habit and nature (“two modes of alteration”) #

Point: either the learner does not “suffer” as was said, or there are two modes of alteration — a change to the privative disposition, and a change toward the state and nature.

• Greek: hexis (“state” in his translation; can mean habit as first species of quality, or simply the having of something, contrasted with privation) and physis.
• Statue vs. eye (anticipating the end of the book): Michelangelo’s marble, or this table carved into a statue of Thomas (a student), loses the shape it had and gets Thomas’s shape as its own — deprived of one shape, given another. When he sees Thomas, his eye does not lose its shape; open his head and there is no little bone statue chiselled there. He has a shape he did not have before, without losing anything: fulfilling his nature by having the forms of other things, “not being altered in the strict sense.”

10. §181: the comparison applied to sense (“The first change of the sensitive”) #

Point: having a sense is compared to having a science (habit); sensing in act is compared to considering.

• Translation note: “it already has, like knowledge” should read “sense.”
• The first change of the sensitive comes from what generates: in the womb, cell division, the senses develop hidden from us; no one remembers acquiring sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch. But we remember acquiring grammar or geometry — the Greek alphabet, grandchildren singing ABC, the pain of it. This answers why this is more known to us in reason: acquiring a science is known, acquiring a sense hidden.
• Once one has a sense there is no difficulty in using it: “I’m going to show you a movie today” — no resistance; walking students through the museum, they need only look. So too the man who has the science can talk “out of the abundance of his knowledge,” pleasantly and without struggle; the struggle is in acquiring.
• Three stages in sense too: the fertilized egg is the kind of thing able by nature to have senses (not yet seeing); then it has them; then there remains an ability to the further act, sensing. Difference noted in passing: the egg will have senses barring some defect, whereas for science “you have to apply yourself.” Aristotle here shows the likeness; differences follow.

11. §182: how sensing and understanding differ (“what is productive of the act of the one is outside”) #

Point: what produces the act of sense (the visible, audible, tastable, smellable) is outside; sense in act is of singulars outside us, science of universals, which are somehow in the soul.

• Shakespeare’s Sonnets and Romeo in exile: the lover cannot see the beloved, “his eyes are deprived.” But he can think what a triangle or a man is any time, with no man present, because man is universal, and the universal is only in the soul.
• Fallacy of the accident (Thomas): “Socrates is a man; man is a species; therefore Socrates is a species.” “Man” signifies the nature, which is found in Socrates, so “Socrates is a man” is true; universality belongs to the nature only as it exists in the mind, so what pertains to universality cannot be said of a man.
• Hence “to understand is in him when he wishes, but to sense is not”: once he learned the definition of perfect number from his master and Euclid he can think it whenever he wants (nothing exterior preventing); before, he could not; but he cannot see his friend or grandchild, or the Mona Lisa, unless present. Reason: the Mona Lisa is a singular sensible outside me and I am in potency to it; the universal is already in me.
• Boethius: a thing is singular when sensed, universal when understood. Albert the Great: the first thing considered in logic is the universal; Boethius: the name said of many things — sensible.
• “The proper place to clarify these things will come” when he takes up the understanding; here it only manifests something about sense.

12. The closing paragraph: potency said in two ways (“the boy is able to command an army”) #

Point: being in potency is not said simply but in two ways, and the sense in potency is likened to the sensible when it has suffered.

• The boy able to command an army (could go to West Point) vs. the one in his prime (Douglas MacArthur, graduated, ready to command). So too the sensitive; since the difference is unnamed, one must use “suffering” and “altering” as proper names but in different senses.
• “Not being likened, it suffers; having suffered, it has been likened and is such as that”: he wants to really emphasize that the one acted upon becomes like the one acting.
• Aside: Sartre refuses to be acted upon, taking all being-acted-upon as imposition in the worst sense (“hell is the others”); Marcel criticizes him well — that would make teaching, friendship (friends act on each other), and God’s acting on us (St Paul’s clay) impossible. Sartre, like Monsignor Dionne, is “stuck on the first meaning”; “they can’t move the word,” the problem of most modern philosophers.

His words #

• ability / act: his renderings of potential/actual; “ability” [ed.: potency], “act” [ed.: actuality].
• to understand: to know what is said to stand under another (meaning under a word; cause under effect; substance under accidents).
• impositio nominis: the placing of a name upon a thing.
• ground: native English word for cause.
• substance: two main meanings — what a thing is; a thing existing not in another; same etymology as “understand.”
• Natural Hearing [ed.: Physics].
• second road: from reasonable guesses toward reasoned-out knowledge; or from thinking about things to understanding them.
• manuductio: being led by the hand.
• knowing (§176): episteme, scientific knowing in the strict sense.
• epidosis: increase into the same thing, a perfecting rather than an altering.
• suffering / undergoing: paschein; two senses — destruction by the contrary; saving of potency by act.
• hexis: “state” in the translation; habit (first species of quality) or the having of something, opposed to privation.
• fallacy of the accident: “Socrates is a man, man is a species, therefore Socrates is a species.”

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, De Anima II.5, his translation §§176–182 and the chapter’s last paragraph.
• Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, the tomb scene line on “ground” (quoted from memory).

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Natural Hearing (Physics) book one; De Anima I (opinions of predecessors after the proemium); “the end of the book” (De Anima) on knower and matter.
• Plato, the slave boy conversations with Socrates (Meno, inferred).
• Thomas Aquinas, on this chapter (mistake accidental to learning; fallacy of the accident; the summary paragraph).
• Euclid, Elements book I; definition of perfect number (arithmetic).
• Shakespeare, Sonnets (lover separated from beloved).
• Boethius and Albert the Great on the first thing considered in logic.
• St Paul, the clay shaped by the potter.
• Sartre; Gabriel Marcel’s criticism of him.
• Verified-source matches: handout “An Exposition of Hamlet’s Exhortation to Use Reason”, p. 42; DHB Vol. III, p. 729 (not named in the transcript).

His questions #

• What does it mean to understand a word? To know the meaning, the thing said to stand under that word.
• What does it mean to understand an effect? To know its cause — the “underlying” cause, the ground.
• What is the second road we always follow in philosophy? From reasonable guesses toward reasoned-out knowledge (from thinking about things to understanding them).
• Can I grasp the centre of this desk? No; to grasp you must separate it from other things, in the hand and in reason.
• Does the slave boy actually know how to double a square? No, he is mistaken; but he is able to know it, and after learning is able to think of it.
• Did I change my thinking when I go to the board and think about a theorem I already know? No; I become more actual in what I already possess, an increase (epidosis).
• Would you say the cook, when he starts to cook dinner, is altered? No — no more than the judge judging or the housebuilder building.
• Has my eye lost the shape it had when I see Thomas? No; I have a shape I did not have, without being deprived of one.
• To have a sense is compared to what in the mind, and to sense to what? To having a science (the habit); to actually considering it.
• Why is this more known to us in reason than in sense? We are aware of acquiring a science, with struggle; acquiring the senses by generation is hidden.
• Why can I think of a perfect number now but not see the Mona Lisa? The universal is in the soul; the singular sensible is outside and must be present.