De Anima III.1: Why Only Five Senses, and the Accidental Perception of Shape, Motion, and Number

Orientation #

He turns “now to Book Three” after having “gone through all five” outward senses; he says chapter 2 will begin to look for interior senses and that “in this next chapter” Aristotle will reason from inward experience that the five senses come back to a common centre. Last time closed Book II ch. 12 and announced Book III; next time takes up III.2 on sensing our own seeing and the common sense.

The class, in order #

1. Animalis homo: the “souled man” in 1 Corinthians 2 (“the animalis homo does not receive”) #

Point: the Latin animalis homo of 1 Cor 2 translates Greek psychikos, from psyche, soul; “animal man” or “natural man” loses that the word means the souled man.

• Paul’s words as he gives them: the animalis homo does not receive the things of the Spirit of God, it is foolishness to him, he cannot know it because these are judged spiritually (pneumatikos); the spiritual man judges all things and is judged by no one.
• Anima is Latin for soul, hence the title De Anima; the Greek word for animal is rather zoon, from life (zoology). So “animal man” is “not necessarily false” but you lose the flavour.
• Thomas’s commentary, read: to know which man is called animalis, go back to the definition: the soul is the form of the body; hence those powers which are acts of bodily organs, the sensitive powers, are proper to the soul; animales are those who follow these powers, among which are the vis apprehensiva (knowing) and the appetitiva (desiring).
  • Animalis on the side of knowing: one who (per the Gloss) judges about God by images of bodies, or the letter of the law, or philosophical reasons, i.e. knowledge derived from sense, inadequate to spiritual things.
  • Animalis on the side of desire: one attracted only to what is according to sense desire; the Gloss: a dissolute, lascivious soul, because the ruling spirit does not keep these within the limits of their natural order.
• Spiritualis, read: we call incorporeal substances (angels, God) spirits; because there is a part of the soul which is not the act of any bodily organ, namely understanding and will (rational desire), this part is called the spirit of man, enlightened in understanding and inflamed in will by the Spirit of God. So spiritual in two ways: on the side of understanding (one subject to the Spirit of God who knows spiritual things certainly and faithfully) and on the side of will (a rectified soul).
• Why Paul says “souled”: if the soul had no powers of the body it would just be a spirit, an angel; this man is concentrated in judgment and desire on his bodily powers.

2. Magnificat: soul and spirit (“my soul magnifies the Lord”) #

Point: one way (not necessarily the only or best) to read “my soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Saviour”: she magnifies the Lord by giving birth to the Word made flesh, and the organs of reproduction are bodily, so soul; but in intellect and will, powers not in the body, she rejoices in God, so spirit.

• Powers in the body as such cannot rejoice in God; there can be overflow between higher and lower powers (church music stimulating lower powers affects the higher), but directly only intellect and will have God as object.
• Hence the theological virtues, which have God in Himself as object, are only in the spirit: faith in the understanding, hope and charity in the will.
• “As the Arab philosophy says”, our soul is on the horizon between the material and immaterial world; it is “more proper to the soul” to be the form of the body; without the bodily powers we would not be a soul at all but an angel; “we’re not simply an angel in a body”.

3. What Book III chapter 1 does (“there is perhaps no other sense”) #

Point: Aristotle argues “with some probability, but not with complete certitude” that there is no outward sense besides sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, the reasons being based on the theory of the four elements; and he clears up a possible confusion that there is no further outward sense of the common sensibles. Chapter 2 begins the search for inward senses.

4. The argument from touch, part to part (“someone might believe from the following”) #

Point: the word “believe” signals the argument is not necessary.

1. Touch knows every tangible quality, and these are the qualities of the elements (hot, cold, wet, dry), which we seem to know.
2. Reasonable guess, from part to part: then sight knows everything visible, hearing everything audible.
3. If some sense were missing, some sense organ would be missing in us; whatever we sense by touching we sense by touch, which we have.

5. Senses through a medium: air and water (“the simple elements I mean, such as by air by water”) #

Point: the other senses know through a medium; of the four elements only air and water can be media, and the organs are from these two, so we seem to have all the senses that work through them.

• Air for the ear, water for the eye (the pupil is water), one or the other for smell; if one organ senses many sensibles differing in kind (air is medium of both sound and colour), the animal senses both.
• Fire: no organ is made of fire, or it is common to all, since nothing senses without some heat. Earth: of none, or most properly mixed in touch, “the most earthly of the senses”.
• Aside on the elements and death: Lear holding dead Cordelia, “dead is earth”; the soul compared to air (give up the ghost, exhale) or to fire (Othello, “put out the light”); water has to do with life; but “dust thou art, and to dust thou shalt be turned”, never “you’re fire and to fire you shall return”.
• Text: no sense organ outside water and air; some animals (you, me, the cat) have these; so all senses are had by those not imperfect (a dog does not see for a few days), not mutilated (the blind man); even the mole has eyes under its skin; if there is no other body and no passion than those here, no sense is missing.
• Caution: “only maybe a probable argument”; you would not push it as necessary; dogs hear and smell what we do not, and some people smell or hear what he does not.

6. No other sense knows the common sensibles (“couldn’t there be another outward sense”) #

Point: if some sense had the common sensibles as its proper object, they would be accidental to the other five, as sweet is to the eye; but that is not our experience.

• I know the length and shape of this table through colour, and the shape and length through hardness by touch.
• Sweet really is accidental to sight: the Quebec bakery cakes looked “disgustingly sweet” untasted, but that is remembrance of tasting things that look like that; if a kid put salt in the sugar bowl the eye would be completely deceived until tasting. I see the shape of the table in a way I do not see the sweetness of the cake.
• Text: no proper organ of the common sensibles, which we sense by each sense accidentally: motion, rest, shape, magnitude, number, and “notice he adds the word one”.

7. Digression: one, number, and two infinities (“the division of the continuous”) #

Point: the first meaning of one for us is the continuous; number in the ordinary sense arises from division of the continuous.

• One piece of chalk broken is two; a plate dropped and broken is many (Socrates’ joke: I asked for one thing, a definition, and you gave me many).
• Consequence for the Trinity (not studied today): Thomas is careful that “three persons” is not the ordinary three, since there is nothing continuous in God, who is altogether simple.
• A second infinity comes from the mind’s ability to say a thing is itself: “Socrates is Socrates”, and that statement is itself, and so on, as many Socrates as you want; likewise “God is God” as many gods as the Hindus. A “purely mental infinity”, without foundation in things.
• Russell’s objection to “the whole is more than the part”: double every number, an even for every number, so the evens equal all numbers. Reply (De Koninck pointed this out): it is not the same two; the multiplicity comes from the mind coming back upon itself (I know a triangle, I know that I know, …); “the mind never gives out”; Anaxagoras’ first word about mind is that it is infinite. Not a fruitful infinity; some infinities are more fruitful than others.
• Feuerbach (between Hegel and Marx/Engels, who read him with enthusiasm): the essence of Christianity is that man is God; syllogism: man’s mind is infinite, the infinite is God, so man’s mind is God. Fallacy of equivocation on “infinite”, and of simpliciter/in some way: God infinite in every way, our mind in some way. “Bertie” is doing something like that.
• Number from division of the continuous was the subject of ancient arithmetic.

8. The text resumed: sweet by sight, the son of Cleon (“just as how we sense the sweet by sight”) #

Point: it is impossible for there to be a proper sense of any of the common sensibles, for then it would be as we sense the sweet by sight.

• We know sweet by sight only because we happen to have both senses and they come together; otherwise only accidentally, as we sense the son of Cleon: not because he is the son of Cleon but because he is white, and the white happens to be his son.
• The reasoning: if common sensibles were the object of another sense, they would be altogether accidental to the five, as sweet to sight; but it is through colour that I know the shape of this book, “the green goes this far and then stops”.
• Aristotle’s example is bile; he prefers sugar and salt.

9. The same thing known in two different ways (“the same thing to be known in two different ways”) #

Point: common sensibles known by more than one sense are the fundamental and easiest example that one thing can be known in two ways; he lines up further examples up to faith and reason.

• Shape by colour through the eye and by hardness through the hand; counting your steps by ear as feet hit the ground, or by watching.
• Summa contra Gentiles (“my favourite book”), divided differently from the Summa Theologiae: books 1-3 treat what can be known of God (in Himself, as Maker, as End, His Providence) by reason as well as faith, giving philosophical reasons then quoting Scripture in confirmation; book 4 (Trinity, Incarnation) does not, since these are known only by faith.
• The abortion debate: opponents assume that whatever the Church pronounces on is ipso facto a matter of faith, not reason, as though the Church had nothing to say only about things like water being H2O; “that’s ridiculous”, the same thing can be known in different ways.
• Two ways of knowing will probably not overlap entirely: the eye knows colour, touch knows hardness, but through what each knows primarily it knows something else (shape).
• Coming example: from inward experience Aristotle will deduce that the five senses come back to a common centre; anatomy (nerves back to the brain) may know the same thing a different way; some things known only by inward, some only by outward experience; they try to cooperate the two (stimulating a part of the brain, “I’m experiencing red”; injury and loss of speech).
• Earth’s sphericity: from the nature of earth to seek the centre (natural middle term) and from its circular shadow on the moon (mathematical).
• Related: more than one reason for the same statement, e.g. two reasons to come into philosophy from its natural beginnings (we understand best following a thing from its beginning; we acquire what is not natural through what is natural); Euclid or Heath’s notes give alternate proofs; the interior angles of a triangle equal two right angles proved via the parallel theorem, or (as he first learned) by a line through the vertex parallel to the opposite side. Class cut off here.

His words #

• animalis homo; the “souled” man, Paul’s psychikos; not “animal/natural man” without reference to soul
• pneumatikos; spiritually, from the word for spirit
• zoon; Greek for animal, from life
• vis apprehensiva / appetitiva; the knowing (grasping) power and the desiring power
• spirit of man; the part of the soul not the act of a bodily organ: understanding and will
• horizon; the soul between material and immaterial worlds (“as the Arab philosophy says”)
• argument from part to part; touch knows all tangibles, so sight all visibles
• common sensibles; motion, rest, shape, magnitude, number, one
• accidental sensible; sweet to the eye, the son of Cleon to sight
• one; first meaning for us is the continuous
• mental infinity; from the mind saying a thing is itself and coming back upon itself
• fallacy of simply [ed.: secundum quid / simpliciter]; God infinite in every way, our mind in some way

Texts #

Read in class

• Paul, 1 Corinthians 2, towards the end (animalis homo, spiritual man judges all things)
• Thomas Aquinas, commentary on 1 Corinthians 2 (animalis, spiritualis, with the Gloss) (locus inferred)
• Aristotle, De Anima III.1 (from “there is not a sense other than the five” to the son of Cleon; page refs “twenty six”, “two seventy one” in his edition) Mentioned
• Magnificat, Luke 1 (inferred)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles, books 1-4 (structure)
• Shakespeare, King Lear; Othello
• Bertrand Russell on the whole and the part; Feuerbach, Essence of Christianity; Anaxagoras on mind; De Koninck
• Euclid, Elements; Heath’s notes

His questions #

• How would you translate animalis homo? “Animal man” or “natural man”; the Greek is psychikos, the souled man.
• Why does Paul call this man the “souled”? Because the soul is the form of the body; this man follows the bodily powers in knowing and desiring.
• Why does Mary say “soul magnifies” but “spirit rejoices”? One reading: giving birth is bodily (soul), rejoicing in God is intellect and will (spirit); he is not sure it is the best.
• Of the four elements, which can be media? Air and water; fire common to all, earth to touch.
• Is the argument that we have all the senses necessary? No, only probable; dogs hear and smell what we do not.
• Could there be another outward sense that knows the common sensibles? No: then they would be accidental to the five, as sweet to sight, which is not our experience.
• How many Socrates can I get from “Socrates is Socrates”? As many as you want, but a purely mental infinity.
• Where does Russell’s multiplicity of twos come from? From the mind coming back on itself; not the same two, so the part does not add up to the whole.
• Can the same thing be known in two different ways? Yes: shape by eye and touch; the first example, up to faith and reason.