Sight versus Hearing, the Continuous, and Socrates and Christ as Spoken Teachers

Orientation #

He opens: “since we just talked a bit about the eye, and we haven’t talked about hearing,” turning to Aristotle’s comparison of eye and ear in the book on sense and the sensible, “as we mentioned in that earlier reading” of the common sensibles and the “little study, back a while ago, about the continuous” (prev. lectures, not resolved by context). He says nothing about next time. The previous class worked through the transparent, light and colour in De Anima II; the next takes up touch and reception of forms without matter.

The class, in order #

1. Which sense is better, sight or hearing? (“which is better, sight or what? Hearing”) #

Point: Aristotle poses the comparison, and Thomas’s commentary is followed.

• Proemium to “wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics] singles out sight. Ordinary test: would you rather be deaf or blind? The average person: deaf.
• Anecdote: a pious girl, a lover of music (piano, organ), insisted she’d rather be blind; he answered from scripture, “the apple of your eye” — scripture singles out the eye. A student adds her likely reply: “faith comes by hearing.”
• The contrast Aristotle makes in the Metaphysics and that returns in this text: the eye is the sense of discovery (by oneself); the ear is the sense of learning from the teacher.

2. Sight is better as such (“sight, secundum se as such is better”) #

Point: sight announces to us many differences of things because its object, the visible, is found in all bodies.

1. This rests partly on the theory that sun, moon and stars are not hot and cold like the four elements, but are visible — “we may not agree with that particular observation.”
2. Still: would there be any astronomy if we had no eyes? We hear, feel nothing from the moon while on earth; without eyes we would be earthbound. So sight has a kind of universality, at least of distance.
3. Reason (Thomas): a thing becomes visible when the transparent is illuminated in act by a lucid body; in the lucid, lower bodies communicate with the higher (fire is lucid in the sun, moon). So all bodies, higher and lower, partake of colour — either colour in its proper notion (where the transparent is terminated) or at least its principles, the transparent and light.

3. The common sensibles are more known through sight (“Through this sense are known more the common sensibles”) #

Point: the more universal a power is, the more potent; sight extends to the common sensibles.

• Common sensibles: known not by one sense alone (as the private/proper sensibles) but by many: magnitude, figure, rest, motion, number — the same enumeration as before.
• Argument: the proper sensible qualities are all forms in the continuous; so the continuous is the per se and common subject of all sensible qualities, not accidentally. Example: the surface is hard, the surface is coloured.
• The common sensibles all pertain to the continuous: as its measure (magnitude), its division (number), its termination (figure/shape), distance and proximity (motion).
• Sight and touch seem the only senses that know shape and surface; sight is the clearer. Notice the emphasis Thomas gives: all the common sensibles are tied up with the continuous.

4. The continuous behind all thinking and naming (“the soul understands nothing without the continuous”) #

Point: the continuous is basic to our knowledge, our images, and the first meanings of our fundamental words.

1. Aristotle (Memory and Reminiscence): the soul understands nothing without the continuous — because we never think without forming an image, and all images are tied to the continuous.
2. The basic words of the axioms and of wisdom are equivocal, but equivocal “by reason”: there is an order among the meanings, and one must start with the first meaning and see how the word is carried over.
3. Before/after (from his definition of reason: the ability for a large discourse, looking before and after; studied earlier in the Categories): first meaning is in time, which is continuous; tied to it, before in motion (continuous) and before on the road one travels — the newsletter picture of looking out on the road; philosophy called “knowledge over a road,” and road first names something continuous.
4. Beginning/end: first meaning is in magnitude (beginning of the line, of the table, end down there). Aristotle in Metaphysics XII and the Apocalypse (“I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end”) apply these to God, but not in that sense. In Metaphysics V the first word treated is “beginning,” and only at the fourth and sixth senses does one reach the sense in which God is beginning; he follows the meanings over, likewise for “end” and “before.”
5. One: wisdom is about being and one; the first meaning of one is the continuous — one piece of chalk, broken: two. We must believe in one God (the fundamental Hebrew thing), but “one” of God does not mean continuous, though that is its first meaning for us.

5. Private sensibles are transferred only by metaphor (“taste and see how sweet is the Lord”) #

Point: names from the private sensibles are not given new meanings; names from the continuous are.

• Sweet vs. beginning: Thomas on the Psalms explains that God is called sweet metaphorically — a distant likeness, not a new meaning, otherwise it would not be a metaphor. “I am the beginning and the end” is not a metaphor but a different meaning of beginning and end than the first, continuous one.
• Thomas on Boethius’s De Trinitate: how do we think about God, who is not continuous? By thinking that he is not continuous — the via negativa; in this life we know God negatively (not a body, unchangeable), not falsely. In the beatific vision we see God through God, joined to our reason: both what we see and that by which we see.

6. Hearing is better for the understanding, accidentally (“hearing is better for the understanding”) #

Point: hearing knows fewer things than sight, but speech is a cause of learning.

• Not as such (by the differences of sounds) but accidentally: the names of which speech is composed are symbols, signs of things understood, and so of things. The teacher signifies to the student the conception of his own mind.
• So man can know more by learning from another (hearing) than by finding out for himself (sight).
• Thomas: among those deprived of a sense from birth, the blind are wiser than the deaf. He has no experience of deaf or blind people to judge; “interesting that he apparently had some observation of that.”

7. Two ways Socrates is like Christ (“In what two ways is Socrates like Christ”) #

Point: Socrates (teacher of Plato, teacher of Aristotle) resembles Christ in why he was killed and in how he taught.

1. Matthew’s chapters on why they wanted to put Christ to death: he claimed to be God; he pointed out their wickedness; and he examined the Pharisees and showed they didn’t know what they claimed to know — whose son is Christ? David’s; then how does David call him Lord? — and they couldn’t answer. That one reason for Christ’s death is, from the Apology, almost the only reason for Socrates’ death: examining those admired for knowing and showing they did not know. Both put to death unjustly.
2. (Student answer) He taught by the spoken word. Christ wrote nothing (only in the sand); Socrates wrote nothing — without Plato’s dialogues and others’ comments we’d have no words of his; St John similar.

• Thomas’s question: why did Christ teach only by the spoken word? Because the spoken word is a more perfect tool of teaching than the written, and the teacher by antonomasia uses the most perfect tool. Socrates partly like that (also he thought he had nothing to say but drew it out of you); the dialogues say the written word corrupts memory.
• Plato thanked the gods for three things: born a man not a woman, a Greek not a barbarian, and that he met Socrates.
• Aside: with Plato and Aristotle we lack the spoken word; teaching from secondary texts without going through them with students shows the importance of the spoken word.
• Aside: his joke at the printing office about the written word and forgetfulness [unclear in recording].

8. Student question: why the written word breeds forgetfulness (“the printed word leads to forgetfulness”) #

Point: was it Thomas who said it? No — Plato or Socrates in the dialogues; you start to rely on it.

• Kids and the computer: access to everything, so why memorize? Trivium school: his son Marcus memorized the whole Raven. Nobody memorizes now.
• What memorizing does: Psalms he knows come back when thinking of something else; memorizing a Shakespeare sonnet makes him notice things in it, then its relevance appears in an entirely different class — it concentrates attention.
• Thomas, looking down on Paris, would trade the whole city for Chrysostom’s commentary on John; he must have known the Psalms, maybe the gospels, by heart. Poets and actors memorized whole plays; we have decayed.
• Student: is the spoken word more perfect because of direct access to the teacher? Answer: the spoken word is the original word; the written is only a sign of the spoken — missionaries always found a spoken language and had to invent a written one to translate the Bible.

His words #

• “wisdom”: his name for Aristotle’s Metaphysics [ed.: Metaphysics].
• secundum se: “as such”; sight is better secundum se.
• private sensibles: sensibles known by one sense alone [ed.: proper sensibles].
• common sensibles: known by many senses — magnitude, figure, rest, motion, number.
• lucid body: what illuminates the transparent in act; lower bodies communicate with higher in it.
• equivocal by reason: many meanings with an order and connection among them, starting from a first meaning.
• reason: “the ability for a large discourse, looking before and after.”
• philosophy: “knowledge over a road.”
• via negativa: knowing God in this life by what he is not.
• by antonomasia: Christ as “the teacher.”

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, commentary on Aristotle’s On Sense and the Sensible, on sight vs. hearing, the common sensibles and the continuous, speech as cause of learning, blind vs. deaf from birth (locus not stated).

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Metaphysics: proemium (sight); Book V (beginning, end, before); Book XII (God as beginning and end); “being and one.”
• Aristotle, Categories (first meaning of before: time).
• Aristotle, On Memory and Reminiscence (“the soul understands nothing without the continuous”).
• Thomas, on Boethius’s De Trinitate (thinking of God who is not continuous).
• Thomas, commentary on the Psalms (God called sweet metaphorically).
• Thomas on why Christ taught only by the spoken word (locus not stated).
• Scripture: “apple of your eye”; “faith comes by hearing”; Apocalypse, “I am the Alpha and the Omega”; Matthew, whose son is Christ.
• Plato, Apology; the dialogues on writing and memory.
• Poe, The Raven; Shakespeare sonnets; Chrysostom on John.

His questions #

• Would you rather be deaf or be blind? The average person: deaf; the music-loving student: blind.
• Would there be any astronomy at all if we didn’t have eyes? No; we’d be earthbound, knowing nothing beyond earth by the other senses.
• What’s the first meaning of before? Time (Categories), which is continuous.
• What’s the first meaning of beginning and end? Magnitude — the beginning and end of a line.
• What’s the first meaning of one? The continuous — one piece of chalk, broken: two.
• How do we think about God, who is not continuous? By thinking that he is not continuous — negatively, in this life.
• In what two ways is Socrates like Christ? He examined those who claimed to know, and this got him killed; he taught only by the spoken word.
• Why did Christ teach only by the spoken word? Thomas: the spoken word is the more perfect tool of teaching.
• Why is the spoken word the more perfect tool? It is the original word; the written word is only a sign of the spoken.