De Anima III, Lectio 3: The Common Sense and Judging White from Sweet

Orientation #

He says “the philosophers before him had not really distinguished between sense and reason” is a reason Aristotle will give “in the next reading”, and closes by saying this is a good place to break “before we go out to the fourth” reading. He refers back to earlier classes on the outward senses knowing the same common sensible (shape of the table) and to the beginning of the natural philosophy course on common experience. The previous class previewed exactly this question, whether one sense or two together can discern white from sweet.

The class, in order #

1. Opening: feast of Pius X (“This happens to be the feast of Pius the tenth”) #

Aside before the text: the priest at his house has parents devoted to Pius X; two miracle anecdotes (a crippled boy carried in the Pope’s arms during an audience who slid down and ran around; two dying nuns who came out of an audience “bouncing” so the taxi driver did not believe they were the same). He recalls having used a text from Pius X’s encyclical earlier “talking about causes of error.”

2. n. 285: each sense discerns the differences of its own sensible (“each sense seems to be capable of discriminating”) #

Point: Aristotle begins the new lectio with what each outward sense can do before showing a discrimination none of them can make.

• “Each sense is of its underlying sensible”: the “underlying sensible” is what “we called before the private sensible” [ed.: proper sensible], present in the organ as organ.
• Sight discerns white from black, yellow from green; taste sweet from bitter or sour. So far the outward senses suffice.

3. n. 286: white vs. sweet needs one power; flesh is not the ultimate organ (“we discern white and sweet”) #

Point: since we do sense that white differs from sweet, some sense must know both; and it is not the flesh.

• What is discerned is the sensible difference of the qualities themselves, not what the philosopher by reason says colour or sound is.
• Why the remark about flesh here (which “seems almost out of place”): per Thomas, the common sense is especially close to touch, the most fundamental sense (one can have touch without the others, never the others without touch). If the organ of touch, flesh, were the common sense, he would have to touch the colour of your clothing to compare black with white or with sweet; but his skin is obviously not in touch with you.
• Equivocations of “common sense”: (a) reason’s ability to judge things not too difficult; we borrow sense-words for reason (“that makes sense”, “nonsense”, “a sensible man”), which reflects that reason goes back to the senses as its starting point; (b) hence some say “central sense” to avoid taking it as reason; (c) mistake to avoid: the common sense does not mean the sense that knows the common sensibles; it is the common beginning or common term of all the outward senses’ changes.

4. n. 287: separated things cannot be discerned by separated powers (“something one must say that they are different”) #

Point: neither sight alone, nor taste alone, nor the two together, can judge white differs from sweet; one and the same ability must know both.

1. Sight cannot judge white differs from sweet: it does not know sweet. Likewise taste does not know white.
2. Could the two together? That would be like you knowing white and I knowing sweet: no judgment results.
3. Therefore one ability must know both and judge them different: the common or central sense, an inward sense still a sense power. Homely comparisons for “not even together”: three people knowing only C, A, T cannot spell “cat”; one knowing “every mother is a woman”, another “no man is a woman” cannot syllogize “no man is a mother”; one knowing 4, another 6, cannot multiply to 24; three knowing severally quadrilateral, equilateral, right-angled cannot define the square. In each case at least one head must hold all the parts.

• “So does it understand and sense”: Aristotle uses “understand” because (Thomas) the earlier philosophers had not distinguished sense from reason, and it is Aristotle’s custom to speak in his contemporaries’ opinion before determining the truth. Thomas adds that reason too compares objects of different senses (the physicist on colour and sound), but reason’s object is the what it is of colour or sound, while the common sense is concerned only with the sensible quality.

5. Digression: knowing the same thing in different ways; inward vs. outward experience (“we know ourselves more by inward experience”) #

Point: the same conclusion (outward senses come back to a common centre) could be reached by inward experience or by dissection.

• First case of knowing the same thing two ways: two outward senses and a common sensible; blindfolded he could feel the table’s shape, or see it through colour.
• De Anima is based on our common inward experience of life, as the eight books of Natural Hearing are based on common experience of natural things (experience all men have and cannot avoid).
• Inward experience vs. outward experience: by inward experience we know ourselves best, the animal less (we know in some sense what it is for a dog to be angry or thirsty), the plant least; and even in ourselves thinking and emotions more than digesting or growing (the marks on the wall are outward measurement). By outward experience the order reverses: plant most, animal less, man least, because observation interferes with man: the young teacher tensed by the dean at the back of the class, the mock class at a job interview, “trying to watch yourself fall asleep.”
• Some things known only one way, some by both: dissection might find nerves going back to a joint place, inward experience finds a centre discerning white from sweet.

6. n. 288: it judges now that they are now different (“now he judges that these are different”) #

Point: the “now” is on both sides, of the knowing and of the known, so the discerning is unseparated in an unseparated time.

• Contrast memory: “I now remember the past to be past,” the now is only on the side of the knowing.
• Licorice he is eating: he says now that the blackness and the licorice taste are now different.
• Map of the rest: 289 objection; 290 a solution; 291 counter-objection to that solution; 292 the true solution by a likeness.

7. n. 289-290: the objection from matter and the first solution (“one in number, but many in definition”) #

Point: the objection transfers to sense the way matter is acted upon; the first solution answers with “one in number, many in being.”

• Background: sensing is a kind of undergoing, being acted upon; matter’s receiving is more known to us, so the likeness comes to mind first, though sense and matter receive differently.
• Objection (289): the same undivided thing cannot be moved by contrary motions in undivided time; wood becoming hot cannot be becoming cold; sweet moves the sense one way, bitter contrariwise, white in yet another.
• Solution (290): the discerning is one in number and unseparated, “while in being it is separated.” He finds Aristotle’s phrasing confusing: “to be” here is a contraction of “what was to be,” i.e. definition; so: one in number, many in definition.
• Abilities distinguished by what they are for. Talking vs. walking: two abilities (talking is not a kind of walking), so one can do both at once (joke: “can’t walk and shoot gun at the same time” [unclear in recording who said it]). Healthy vs. sick: not two abilities, since being healthy excludes being sick at the same time; one ability of the body, but “two in definition.” Clay: one moldability, defined as ability to be sphere, cube, cylinder, but not all at once. Standing vs. sitting: like healthy/sick, not like standing/talking.
• Which is the common sense like? A student: the latter (talk/walk). He: more like talking/walking in that both are received at the same time, but talking and walking are two abilities (a paralysed man can talk, a mute can walk), and “we’ve been arguing before that it must be one and the same that knows both.” And it is not like healthy/sick either, since there one contrary excludes the other, whereas the common sense discerns white and sweet, even white and black, at the same time. So the first solution assimilates the union of opposites in sense too much to matter.
• Extension: going up toward reason this is even more true; reason is more capable of receiving contraries at once. “The same knowledge of opposites” (Plato, more fully Aristotle): end of the Symposium, Socrates telling Agathon (tragic poet, the honoree) and Aristophanes (comic poet) that one who knew what he was doing could write both; lesser artists do one only (Aristophanes, Agathon, Molière), the supreme poets both: Homer (Margites to comedy as Iliad to tragedy, per the Poetic Art) and Shakespeare (his brother discovering how funny the comedies are); actor Alec Guinness in both roles. Medical art knows health and sickness: to know blood pressure is high you must know normal (aside: his cholesterol “beyond 200, whatever that means”). Ethics: virtue as the mean determined by right reason is not known without the vices of excess and defect (courage between cowardice and foolhardiness; liberality between stinginess and extravagance). Logic knows correct and incorrect reasoning.
• Student objection recalled from his first teaching at Saint Mary’s College (with his brother Mark and Ron McGrath): since it is the same knowledge of opposites and most people incline to be bad, teaching ethics makes them worse; “a clever objection,” left as such.
• Conclusion he draws: in matter one opposite excludes the other; in reason one opposite helps to know the other (“opposites alongside each other are more clear”: tragedy/comedy, joy/sadness). One of the striking ways to show reason is immaterial.
• Aside on Hegel and Marx: Hegel takes the way opposites are together in the mind and flip-flops it into matter; Marx claims to “set Hegel on his feet” by starting from matter, but has already borrowed opposites-together-in-matter (Lenin: dialectics is the study of contradiction within the very essence of things); so he has not reversed Hegel but transposed the mind’s way into matter.

8. n. 291: the counter-objection (“if sense and understanding are such”) #

Point: the first solution fails if sense is like matter.

• The same undivided thing is contraries in potency but not in being; it is divided by being worked on; white and black cannot be together, “at least in matter”; so it could not undergo the species of both at once “if sense and understanding are such,” i.e. like matter.

9. n. 292: the true solution, the point (“comparing now the central sense to a point”) #

Point: the central sense is like one point that is actually, at the same time, the beginning or end of many lines (to eye, ear, tongue).

• One in number; many insofar as defined as beginning of the line to the eye, or to the ear, or to the tongue, and actually all at once. Contrast with the clay, whose moldability is “an ability to be a sphere” and also a cube but not both at once; and with the body’s ability to health or sickness.
• Continuous (recalled from Natural Hearing, “second book” as he says): that whose parts have a common limit; a point on a line is the common limit of the two parts, end of one and beginning of the other; the diameter is end of the left half and beginning of the right. Aristotle’s text: as undivided it discerns one at one time; as divided it “uses twice the same point at the same time”; it discerns two insofar as it uses the limit twice.
• Aside: the Incarnation. Person is indivisible, like a point; nature like a line with its endpoint. Two lines drawn separately have two endpoints (the heresy: two natures, so two persons). But the human nature was taken to the divine person (“he assumes”, takes to himself), like a second line drawn to the endpoint of the first, which then has no endpoint of its own: two natures, one person. Only “a distant likeness”, “a little crutch.”
• Aside: point is the first meaning of “beginning” (point of line, line of surface, surface of body); every cause is a beginning, not every beginning a cause. Can a beginning have a beginning? Square is beginning of the cube, lines of the square, point of the line, but the point, being indivisible, has no beginning: a concrete image of the cause without a cause, the first cause.
• Aside: Thomas compares the now of eternity to the centre of a circle, in the same relation to all points on the circumference, while those points are before and after one another like the nows of time; the centre is no part of the circumference, as eternity is outside time. Also the man on the mountain seeing at once people spread along a curved road. “Excuse the pun, you can make a lot of points”; “see how important it is to know a little bit of geometry.”

10. Epilogue: still within the genus of sense (“by which we say an animal is sensitive”) #

Point: Aristotle has reached something inward but not yet reason.

• The closing sentence determines the principle “by which we say an animal is sensitive” up to this point: the common sense is an inward sense, not outside the genus of sense as reason will be shown to be.
• Thomas, in the Summa article on the inward senses, following Avicenna, goes further than Aristotle here; in Shakespeare’s time people spoke of five inward senses to match the outward; Thomas speaks of four. To be looked at later. Break before the fourth reading.

His words #

• underlying sensible: the “private sensible” that comes under a sense as its object [ed.: proper sensible]
• common sense / central sense: the inward sense, common beginning and common term of the outward senses’ changes; “central” to avoid the equivocation with reason’s common sense; not the sense of the common sensibles
• “makes sense”, “nonsense”, “sensible man”: sense-words borrowed for reason’s judgments
• inward experience vs. outward experience: the De Anima rests on common inward experience of life
• Natural Hearing: the eight books on common experience of natural things [ed.: Physics]
• undergoing, being acted upon, receiving: what sensing is, with a likeness to matter
• “in being it is separated”: Aristotle’s “to be” as contraction of “what was to be,” i.e. definition; so one in number, many in definition
• ability: what a power is, distinguished by what it is for [ed.: potency]
• moldability: his name for the clay’s one ability to sphere, cube, cylinder
• the same knowledge of opposites: from Plato, more fully in Aristotle
• continuous: that whose parts have a common limit (boundary)
• “uses the limit twice”: how the one point discerns two
• assumes: theological Latin for taking the human nature to oneself
• inward sense: the common sense as still in the order of sense

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, De Anima III, nn. 285-292 (lectio 3 of Thomas, pp. 29-30 of the class text), paragraph by paragraph Mentioned
• Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on De Anima, lectio 3 (on flesh/touch, on “understand and sense”)
• Pius X, encyclical on causes of error (locus not stated)
• Plato, Symposium, end (Socrates, Agathon, Aristophanes)
• Aristotle, On the Poetic Art (Margites to comedy as Iliad to tragedy)
• Aristotle, Natural Hearing [ed.: Physics], “second book” on the continuous (as he says)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, article on the inward senses (Avicenna’s division)
• Thomas on the now of eternity as the centre of a circle (locus not stated)
• Lenin’s definition of dialectics (no locus)

His questions #

• Could sight and taste together know the difference between white and sweet? No; that would be like you knowing white and I knowing sweet; one ability must know both.
• If you know one premise and I the other, can we syllogize? No, not even together; one head must hold both premises.
• Is the ability to be healthy and the ability to be sick two abilities like talking and walking? No; they exclude each other, so one ability, two in definition.
• Is the common sense more like talk/walk or like healthy/sick? Student: the latter; he: like talk/walk in receiving both at once, but unlike it in being one ability; neither fits, hence the point.
• Can the clay be a cube and a sphere at the same time? No; one moldability, many definitions, not actual together.
• Is the point at the root of the lines one point or many? One point, yet beginning or end of each line, actually at the same time.
• Why doesn’t the individual human nature of Christ have its own person? Because it was drawn, like a second line, to the endpoint of the first: assumed by the divine person.
• What is the beginning of the point? It has none; it is indivisible, like the first cause.
• Is the common sense outside the genus of sense? No; it is an inward sense; reason will be seen later to transcend the sense order.