Touch, the Four Elements, and Reception Without Matter (De Anima II, chs. 11-12)

Orientation #

He begins “let’s look a little bit at this chapter eleven” and continues into chapter twelve, saying Aristotle “has gotten through going through the five outward senses” and now says things about sensing in general. He recalls “what we studied a little bit, in Empedocles” and the four-elements theory (earlier class, not resolved by the context block). The previous class compared sight and hearing through De Sensu, and the next finishes II.12 and announces Book III.

The class, in order #

1. Why chapter 11 was worth translating (“the differences of body as body”) #

The point: the tangibles touch on the theme that the knower who receives what he knows is originally lacking it, though for touch this is “a little more involved.”

• The organ of touch cannot be entirely lacking its object, because hot, cold, dry, moist are the basic qualities of bodies (especially on the four-elements theory), and the organ is itself a body.
• Aristotle: the tangibles are “the differences of body as body,” i.e. the differences which determine the elements, “about which we have spoken earlier in those works about the elements” = the book on generation and corruption.

2. The four elements distinguished by two pairs of opposites (“I have put before you life and death”) #

The point: the ancients distinguished the four basic forms of matter by hot/cold and wet/dry.

• Fire: hot and dry. Water: wet and cold. These are “the big opposites” — he recalls the Old Testament text quoted in abortion debates (“I have put before you life and death”) which in its full form also sets fire against water, “because there are opposites like life and death.” (He first says Isaiah, then corrects himself: “No, it’s in the Old Testament.”)
• Earth: cold and dry — the ground is cool when you dig (basement, wine cellar), and with the water out it is dust.
• Air: hot and wet — think of steam; and since in the pre-Aristotelian picture air sits between fire (sun, moon, stars) and water, it shares in both.

3. How he teaches the theory as a reasonable guess (“would you divide them into, let’s say, male and white”) #

The point: the theory is taught “as a reasonable guess, not as the truth,” and it rests on two defensible steps.

1. The basic forms of matter should be divided by opposites. Reason: dividing human beings into “male and white” or “good and female” makes no sense because the same person can be both; male/female, good/bad, young/old work because they are opposites — without opposition “it could be the same thing.” (Aside: Aristotle’s middle term is not “middle age” but “the prime.”)
2. Why hot/cold and wet/dry rather than black/white, hard/soft, sweet/bitter? Because these seem to be the causes of the other sensible contraries:
   • colour: white bread in the toaster goes brown then black; metal heated goes red hot then white hot; his hair wet down is dark and “young,” dried out it is grey and nearly white; wet vs. dry garment; new paint changes as it dries — wet/dry influence colour “to a lesser extent”;
   • hard/soft “even more”: butter hard in the cold refrigerator, softened in the frying pan; sponge soft in water, hard as rock dried; stale bread hardens and can be moistened;
   • taste: things taste differently heated and cooked, or wet or dry.

• Conclusion: if we must know the first kinds of matter through the senses, and distinguish them by opposites, and these are the most basic opposites the senses know, “you’ve arrived” — no obvious way beyond these four; only a “very subtle and roundabout” experiment could reveal hydrogen or oxygen before water. Hence the theory lasted “two thousand years, from Empedocles to Shakespeare.” (He notes modern thermodynamics came close to the deep penetration of matter through heat.) “You kids are ahead of the Greeks by opinion, but they’re ahead of you in their thinking.”
• Asides: Shakespeare’s allusions to the four elements as “common coin” — “I’m all fire and air, and these elements I give to the earth,” which he attributes to Theophrastus [ed.: the line is Cleopatra’s in Antony and Cleopatra (inferred)]. In theology the elements are important as metaphors: air and fire used of God, the psalms of the soul thirsting for God, God as a rock.

4. The organ of touch as a mean of its contraries (“the middle is able to discern”) #

The point: since the organ must itself be hot or cold, we sense not what is like us but what is excessive; the sense is a mean and “the middle is able to discern.”

• Reads: sensing is “a certain suffering,” an undergoing, being acted upon; the maker makes what is in potency like itself; the sense organ “cannot lack entirely its object,” so “we do not sense what is similarly hot and cold and hard and soft, but we sense more what is excessive”; as what senses white and black must be neither in act, so in touch.
• Examples: you notice the air when it is much warmer or colder than you, not at your own temperature. The man in the shower turns the water hotter after a while because he senses it less — a sign he is now receiving heat “as any body receives heat” and so not really sensing it. Going into the ocean is a shock at first, then “people thought it was like bath water, but it really isn’t.”
• The last paragraph of the chapter is “kind of like a summary.”
• He flags the bearing: this hints that the senses must “more or less lack the object” they know, which will matter later for showing why reason is immaterial — receiving the natures of all material things, it must lack material nature itself; something of this is already seen in the senses.

5. Chapter 12: reception of the sensible species without matter (“as the wax receives the sign”) #

The point: Aristotle says generally that sense is receptive of the sensible species without the matter, and Thomas’s commentary expands what Aristotle leaves implicit — that there is “a kind of immateriality in sensing” though the organ is material.

• The comparison: wax receives the form of the signet ring (gold or bronze) “but not as gold or bronze”; so the sense suffers by what has colour, flavour, sound, “not insofar as each of these is named” but as it is of such a sort, according to its account/form.
• Objection he raises: matter always receives form without matter — Christmas cookie dough receives the shape of the metal cutter without the metal, “but that’s not sensing, is it?” So the senses receive the form without matter “in a different way than what it was in the matter to begin with.”

6. Material reception vs. the reception of knowing (“the form of another as other”) #

The point: the difference is stated as a pair.

• Material reception: receiving the form of another as one’s own, while losing the form one had (“form” meaning something formal, not just shape). Michelangelo’s marble slab receives the shape of a woman and her son (the Pietà) as its own shape and loses the irregular shape it had; a block of wood with some unnamed shape, carved into a statue of Thomas (a student), takes Thomas’s shape as its own and loses its own. That is why such reception is an alteration: losing one form to gain another.
• Reception in knowing: receiving the form of another as other, while keeping the form one has. His eye, or his memory tonight, has Thomas’s shape without his eye, bone or flesh taking on that shape as its own. A Greek philosopher said you can see your own shape in someone’s eyes “as if that’s what it is” — “not really what receiving is”; it is “a little bit like the mirror.” The higher the knowing, the more this holds: reason receiving the nature of a dog does not become a dog; it has “grasped” the nature as his hand contains the chalk. Newspaper story of the pit bull that bit a woman and chewed through a policeman’s vest: we know something of that irascible nature “and my mind lost its gentility, its calmness?” — no.
• This is why it is called immaterial reception: “not of this kind that we find in matter all the time.” Boundary case: the artist’s eye receiving the shape of his sitter vs. the clay or marble receiving it — is the clay in the artist’s eye? This is what Aristotle is “hinting at”: receiving the form without matter, and not in the way matter receives.
• But Aristotle goes on to say this reception is not entirely immaterial in the senses, since they are bodily organs and also receive the other way.

7. Touch again: the opposition between the two receptions (“as the warmth now of my own body”) #

The point: touch shows the two receptions working against each other — this is his expansion of Thomas, n. 257.

• In the shower you feel the warmth more at first; later you turn it hotter, because you have been receiving the warmth of the water as the warmth of your own body; insofar as you receive it as your own, you do not know it so much. “An opposition between receiving the warmth of the water as the warmth of my own body and knowing it to be warm water.”
• His wife’s cousin, hot from outdoor manual work in summer, would lie fifteen or twenty minutes at the bottom of his pool with a snorkel to bring his body temperature down — but he had to feel the cold first; it takes time for the body to take the water’s temperature as its own.
• Swimming in the Twin Cities lakes with his friend Roy: kids splash you when you first come in; the first shock is where you feel and know the coldness; as it becomes your temperature “you don’t know it so much.”

8. Organ and power; senses destroyed by excess; the ratio of the sense (“striking the chord strongly”) #

The point: n. 258 distinguishes organ (body) from power (like form), as said before about the soul; n. 259 shows that since the senses are bodies they can be corrupted by excess of their objects.

• Too loud a sound injures the ear: young people at rock concerts; the factory workers he saw in high school, “bang, bang” — “you don’t realize the guy is deaf now.”
• Reason: the sense power is “a certain ratio or proportion,” and excess disturbs it, like a violin string plucked too hard going out of tune. Reads: if the motion is more powerful than the sense organ it “dissolves the ratio,” as striking the chord strongly destroys the concord and tone. Plants cannot sense because they lack that definite ratio.
• Student: what exactly is the ratio in the senses like? Answer: it is like the form. The Pythagoreans said the soul is the harmony of the body, arguing from “like is the cause of love”: the soul delights in harmonious sounds and pictures, so the soul is a harmony. Aristotle rejects this of the soul (“we saw before what he thought the soul was”) but sees its truth of the sense organs: because they have a harmony and proportion of parts, they delight in what is well proportioned, the beautiful — eyes and ears above all. Student’s follow-up (“so the organ isn’t proportioned to handle the sensible?”): no, the point is the organ’s own harmony of parts, and likeness is the cause of love.
• The same holds in the lower senses, where we do not speak of the beautiful: a German wine marked mit Prädikat has a balance of sweet and acid and is refreshing, not sickeningly sweet; the hot Chinese dish that after four or five bites left only burning, the organ “at least temporarily destroyed”; men, said to be more apt to load salt and pepper, have duller, “burned out” taste and smell, women better — his wife smelling the garden flowers from the bedroom while he tries; kids eating Kool-Aid straight or sour candies burn their senses out.
• Closing: the senses involve a harmony or proportion and so naturally delight in the well proportioned — chiefly in the arts of the beautiful (sight and hearing) but also in good-tasting food.

His words #

• “the knower … is originally lacking” what he receives — the theme of the chapter.
• “differences of body as body” — the tangibles: hot, cold, dry, moist, which determine the elements.
• “reasonable guess, not as the truth” — how he teaches the four elements.
• “suffering … undergoing, being acted upon” — sensing as passion.
• “the sense being like a certain mean of the contrarieties”; “the middle is able to discern.”
• “sensible species without the matter” — Aristotle’s general statement about sense.
• “material reception” vs. “reception in knowing”: form of another as one’s own while losing one’s own, vs. form of another as other while keeping one’s own.
• “alteration” — what material reception is, losing one form to gain another.
• “immaterial reception” — called so because not the kind found in matter.
• “ratio or proportion” — what the sense power is; “harmony of parts” of the organ.
• “like is the cause of love” — the Pythagorean principle he applies to the organs’ delight in the beautiful.
• mit Prädikat — the threshold mark on a German wine label, his example of balance.

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, De Anima II.11, end: the tangibles as differences of body; sensing as undergoing; the organ as mean; “we sense more what is excessive”; the middle discerns.
• Aristotle, De Anima II.12, opening: sense receptive of the sensible species without matter; the wax and the signet ring; excess of sensibles destroying the organ, “striking the chord strongly.”
• Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on De Anima, nn. 257 (expanded by him), 258 (organ vs. power), 259 (senses corrupted by excess).

Mentioned

• Aristotle, On Generation and Corruption (“those works about the elements”).
• Old Testament text “I have put before you life and death,” with fire and water (Deuteronomy, inferred).
• Empedocles (studied earlier); the Pythagoreans on the soul as harmony; “one of the Greek philosophers” on seeing your shape in another’s eye.
• Shakespeare’s allusions to the four elements; “I am fire and air” (attributed by him to Theophrastus).
• The Psalms of thirst; God as a rock.

His questions #

• Does it make sense to divide human beings into male and white, or good and female? No — the same person can be both; a division needs opposites.
• Why take hot and cold, wet and dry rather than black and white, hard and soft, sweet and bitter? Because these seem to be the causes of changes in the other contraries — the most basic opposites the senses know.
• Why did the four-elements theory last two thousand years? With senses alone there is no obvious way beyond these four; only a subtle experiment could find something before water.
• The cookie dough receives the shape of the cutter without the metal — is that sensing? No; the senses receive the form without matter in a different way than matter does.
• When reason understands what a dog is, does the reason become a dog? No — it grasps the nature of another as other, keeping its own.
• Why do I feel the shower’s warmth more at first and then turn it hotter? Because I come to receive the warmth as my own body’s warmth, and insofar as I do I no longer know it.
• Why do excesses of the sensibles destroy the sense organs? The sense power is a ratio; a motion stronger than the organ dissolves it, like over-striking a chord.
• What exactly is the ratio in the senses like? Like the form: the organ’s harmony of parts, which is why (like loving like) the senses delight in the well proportioned.