Senses vs. Reason, Excess of Objects, and a Discussion of Evil as Privation

Orientation #

He is finishing “the last part of chapter twelve” (De Anima II) and announces “next time we’ll start with book three,” where Aristotle turns to the inward senses chiefly to prepare the way for reason. The reference to two contraries where “one is always lacking something” is to “the first book” of natural hearing, which “we saw” earlier (prev. lecture not cited; his own back-reference). The previous class treated touch and the reception of sensible forms without matter; the next opens De Anima III.1.

The class, in order #

1. Do sensibles act on what does not sense? (“whether the objects of the senses act”) #

Point: Aristotle’s closing question of ch. 12, which Berquist calls “fairly tangential.”

• Exception: hot/cold, wet/dry, which are qualities of bodies and do act on bodies.
• The others, as sensible, do not act on their object: if sound knocks down a door, it does so not as sound but as motion, “as wind or air.”

2. Receiving the form of another; the sign that reason has no organ (“you are receiving the form of another”) #

Point: sensing is a reception of form, but one has to say “in a different sense” than alteration.

• A student: “in some way you are receiving a form.” He agrees: Aristotle says knowing is alteration only in a different sense.
• Anticipates Book III: the soul “is in some way all things,” by sense all sensible things, by reason all understandable things; it receives the forms of all things without their becoming an actual form of the thing. “A very kind of mysterious thing… a very, very, very wonderful thing.”
• Sense vs. reason: reason has no organ, no body. Sign: after considering something very understandable you understand other things “even better”; but a very strong flavour prevents tasting, a bright light temporarily blinds. So the senses are bodies and can be temporarily affected or destroyed by too strong an object; reason cannot.

3. Four grades of reception, up to God the Son (“receives the divine nature from God the Father”) #

Point: an aside from his current reading of Summa contra Gentiles IV shows how far “reception” reaches.

• Thomas there defends the Word from Scripture against Photinus, Sabellius and “the most formidable,” Arius; then raises difficulties from reason.
• Objection reported: the Son receives the divine nature from the Father; receiver and received are not the same; so there is composition in the Son; God is altogether simple; so the Son is not God. Thomas answers “in chapter 14.”
• To grasp the answer one must understand, in order of increasing difficulty: (1) how matter receives, especially reception that is suffering/undergoing; (2) how the senses receive; (3) how reason receives; (4) how the Son receives the divine nature.
• A student asks whether the first kind is “material reception… like imprint”: yes, and it is the easiest for us to understand; the Trinity is most understandable in itself but not to us.
• His own case confirms §2: after exercising his mind on the Trinity, “I’m not incapacitated to think about these things… I can now think more easily about these things.”

4. Examples of the sensible impeding, the intelligible aiding (“you can’t do justice to the wine”) #

• Pizza with pepperoni, pastrami with real mustard (“not this French stuff… from Dijon”) overwhelm a Cabernet or fine red wine: the tongue “destroyed temporarily,” so drink beer instead.
• TAC students: after harder mathematics, Euclid’s earliest theorems seem “easy and facile” — we understand lesser things “even more so.”
• Great philosophers (Charles De Koninck, Monsignor Dionne) usually have good judgement in fiction or music, which is less understandable than philosophy; one whose avocation is jazz rather than Mozart — “there’s something wrong with the guy.”

5. Student questions: shock, loud music, and the two receptions in one organ (“proportion our ears to it”) #

Point: the organ receives both materially and cognitively, and the first can get in the way of, or destroy, the second.

• Student: a hot body in a cold shower can die of shock; could we listen to louder rock music if we proportioned our ears? He: the music is simply too loud; doctors can tell which ear faced the band by the damage.
• Student: is that different from the cold-water shock? He restates: entering warm shower or cold ocean one feels the temperature most at first; the organ then receives the temperature “as its own” (material reception) and feels it less. So material reception “gets in the way” of cognitive reception, which shows they are two kinds; yet both go on in the organ because it is material.
• Because it receives materially it can be harmed: Spanish torture, eyelids propped with a toothpick and light shone in until blind; sound loud enough makes a man deaf; taste “burned out.”
• “There’s a couple points”: (a) excess of the object destroys the sense, since the sense is “a kind of harmony or ratio proportion”; (b) it can also merely get in the way of sensing.
• His mother: eat the orange first, then candy, or the orange tastes bitter. Taste wine with bread, something mild. “Sour this, sour that” jelly beans give a sensation but destroy the subtlety of taste.
• Dr. Wallette paid for a fancy wine tasting, drank hospital coffee too fast, burned his tongue: nose still good, tongue affected.

6. Looking ahead to Book III (“next time we’ll start with book three”) #

Aristotle turns to the inward senses, “not in distinguishing all the inward senses” but to see the difference between reason and inward senses and prepare for reason; they will spend a chapter or two at most before reaching reason.

7. A student’s article: is the bad always a lack? (“too narrow a meaning of lack”) #

Point: a student reports an author’s argument; Berquist locates its defect in the meaning of “lack.”

• The argument: if something from another planet obliterated the human race, that would be bad; but those people no longer exist, so there is no subject of privation; the universe, not being a substance, cannot lack anything. So bad is not always a lack.
• His diagnosis: the author thinks of lack only as in an individual substance (a blind man, a man lacking an arm; ignorance) — something it is able to have and should have, obviously bad. Of what does not exist one indeed cannot speak of lacking.
• Counter: a family (father, mother, children) is not an individual substance but a society, a “unity of order”; if father or mother dies or abandons it, the family lacks what it should have, and that is bad. Likewise a homemade salad dressing “lacks something,” “needs something.” A student: so you need some unity, a kind of substance? He: not an individual substance; you could not put the family in the genus substance as a species; it has a unity of order, yet is bad by lack.

8. Would God’s not creating have been bad? (“suppose God had not created anything”) #

Point: the author’s principle, followed consistently, would make non-creation bad; Berquist argues it would not.

1. God created freely, under no necessity and no moral obligation.
2. Badness is a lack, and a lack needs a subject able to have it.
3. Had there been no creatures, there would be no subject; so nothing bad. Thomas or Augustine would say so; “I suspect this guy would say it’s bad… bad for us.”

• Against the author’s “no subject left” in the meteor case: one can speak of a unity of order in the universe — we are “to fill up the ranks of the fallen angels,” a lack we supply — so there is a lack there in some sense.
• Source of the error: the “false imagination” that creation is a change, with the creature as subject passing from non-being to being (Thomas: creation is not really a change). So one imagines non-existent creatures as deprived of what they should have; but they are not there to be deprived, and existence is not owed to them. Consistently, the author would have to say the non-existence of all creation is bad — “a reason not to create… because creation is going to involve something bad.”
• The author’s proposition, as the student reports it: “the root of things is lack”; Berquist has not read the article seriously, only “a little bit… in the journal.”

9. Destruction of an existing thing: where is the subject of privation? (“still have a subject of privation”) #

• Student: a tree blown up, or the Colorado forest fires, Hiroshima destroying people — bad, though the tree is gone. He: there is still a subject, matter, for the privation of the form; but the evil is “not of the matter, but of the one who had the form” — “a little problem there.”
• Resolution as he leaves it: for matter not to have this form is not bad in itself; but the lack of the form is the end of the corruption of the other thing and so can be said in some way to be the privation of that thing, even though it is not its subject. “It’s a hard thing to understand too.”

10. Three meanings of “bad”; pain; the godlike bad (“three meanings of the word bad”) #

• A text of Thomas distinguishes: (1) the lack; (2) what has the lack; (3) what causes the lack. (2) and (3) are called bad in reference to the lack, not as being simply lacks — so Thomas does not say everything bad is a lack; the author may not have understood this.
• The author’s other argument, from pain: even Avicenna said pain is not just a lack. Berquist: pain as such is bad, and not just a lack; but its cause is something lacking, so expect pain to be lacking; and as in the first book of natural hearing, of two contraries one is always privative — pain lacks in comparison to pleasure, which is the perfection of the operation, while pain is not. Student: so it lacks the health of the body? Yes, and its cause is a lack too.
• Student: if pain is not just a lack, is the non-lack part good? He: like vice — perhaps part of vice is good, “but still, vice as such is bad”; pain as such is bad, per accidens good, not necessarily in a moral sense.
• Reductio on the author: deny a lack at the basis of everything bad and you posit a being lacking nothing yet bad; but every being as such is like God, “I am who am” — so some bad would be “Godlike.”
• Asides: the author is at Steubenville, with a student who wrote a doctoral thesis on it in Europe; the view is contrary to Augustine and Thomas; whether it comes from Scotus, “I don’t know.” Sadness is spoken of as dark, darkness the common example of a lack (“I’ve been in a cave for so long”); Aristotle develops the privative contrary “in book 10” [locus as he states it, work not specified].

His words #

• “as others” / “the form of another”: the sense receives the form of another without its becoming the sense’s actual form.
• “knowing is alteration”: only “in a different sense.”
• “the soul is in some way all things”: anticipation of Book III.
• “receiving that is suffering… undergoing”: material reception [ed.: passio].
• “harmony or ratio proportion”: what a sense is, hence destructible by excess.
• “unity of order”: a family or the universe, not an individual substance, yet able to lack.
• “false imagination”: picturing creation as a change from non-being to being.
• “end of the corruption”: the lack of form in matter as the privation of the thing corrupted.
• “natural hearing” [ed.: Physics].
• “per accidens”: how pain can be good.

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, De Anima II.12, last part (sensibles acting on non-sensing things; reception of form).

Mentioned

• Aristotle, De Anima III (soul in some way all things; inward senses and reason; next class).
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles IV, on the Word against Photinus, Sabellius, Arius; objection from the Son’s receiving, answered “in chapter 14.”
• Aristotle, “natural hearing,” first book (one contrary privative of the other); “book 10” (same point, work unspecified).
• A text of Thomas on three meanings of “bad” (no locus given).
• Avicenna on pain; Augustine and Thomas on evil as lack; Scotus (queried); Euclid.
• An unnamed journal article by a Steubenville author, “the root of things is lack.”

His questions #

• If sound knocks out the door, it’s not as sound but as what? Motion, wind or air.
• Reason doesn’t have a what? An organ, a body.
• If I eat something hot and spicy, then I can’t what? Taste anymore.
• Suppose God had not created anything — would that have been bad? No: no subject, so no lack, so no badness (Thomas and Augustine).
• Could you put the family into the genus of substance as a species? No; it is a unity of order, yet can lack and so be bad.
• Is the part of pain that is not a lack good? Like vice, perhaps in part; but pain as such is bad.
• If there is no lack at the basis of everything bad, what follows? A being lacking nothing yet bad — and so bad that is “Godlike.”
• Where is the subject of privation when a tree is destroyed? Matter; but the evil is of the one that had the form — left as “a hard thing to understand.”