De Anima III.3: Grasping and Judging, Sensing vs. Reason, and the Prevalence of Error

Orientation #

He says chapter 2 ended “before the break” with Aristotle’s epilogue on the sensitive principle (prev. lecture), and that next time they begin at §304, the difference between image and opinion. He also refers back to “what we learned the other time”: Aristotle’s reason why we have many senses, given for the good of reason (prev. lecture). A verified handout page (“The First Definition of Reason”, p. 103) is read for about six minutes, probably in the grasping/judging stretch (segment 3–4). The previous class treated the common sense’s discernment of white and sweet; the next continues with sensation vs. understanding and imagination vs. thought.

The class, in order #

1. Where chapter three sits (“chapter three is the chapter now”) #

Chapter 3 occupies four lectios in Thomas: first to §304, then §§304–318, then 318 on; chapter 4 begins at §322 (p. 36). Chapter 3 is a transition from the senses, including the inward senses, to reason: preliminary showing that reason differs from sense, then (next time) image vs. opinion, which will also illuminate what an image is.

2. Recalling Book I: two marks of soul, and sleep vs. death (“the comparison between sleep and death”) #

Point: Aristotle recalls that his predecessors sought the soul through two differences, self-motion (place to place) and knowing, without distinguishing sensing from understanding.

• Anima gives us “animal”, not plant: life in plants is hidden (Book I), so soul was investigated through what the animal does. “Animate matter” literally = matter with a soul.
• Manuductio by opposites: sleep is a removal of just what marks the animal (sensing, moving about), which is why poets liken sleep to death, while vegetative powers (digesting, growing) go on in sleep. Examples: Shakespeare’s Henry IV, where Prince Hal takes the crown thinking his sleeping father dead (he praises the father–son scenes); The Tempest, the brother tempted to kill his sleeping brother, who already “looks like” what he would become; Homer; Scripture’s “fall asleep” for dying, a metaphor Christians use more because of the resurrection, God waking us as easily as a man shaken awake.

3. Understanding and judging: two acts in knowing (“grasping and judging”) #

Text: “men mostly define the soul by two differences… understanding and judging seem to be like a certain sensing; for in both the soul discerns and knows being.” Senses too discriminate (the wine-taster judges by taste), so the ancients, like the English empiricists, did not see sensing/imagining and thinking as really different.

• Greek: the word translated “understanding” is the one usually rendered intelligere; “judging” is phronein, tied to practical wisdom; the phronimos is the man of good judgment. This returns at the start of ch. 4 (“knows and judges”), where Thomas takes “knows” as grasps.
• Distinction: grasping (understanding what an author means) vs. judging (whether it is true or false). English uses “understand” for grasping (“he misunderstood what I said”).
• Judging is the perfection of knowing, so it especially marks the wise man: sapere/sapientia; Solomon judging whose baby it is; “a man of good judgment” = “a man of good sense” (sense/reason likeness again). Aside: his father, the young executive who said “I’ll tell you tomorrow” and whose advice the boss followed.
• Complaint: modern philosophers speak so obscurely one cannot grasp them, so cannot judge them; the colleague at St. Mary’s still asking what Heidegger meant by being after three years (“the proportion is all wrong”). Thales’ “water is the beginning of all things” can be grasped and then judged. Ho philos estin allos autos: no one can judge it until it is put in English, “a friend is another self.”

4. Definition of judging, tested in geometry (“separating the true from the false”) #

Definition (for reason): judging is separating the true from the false by some beginning in our knowledge.

• “Berquist is standing / is not standing”: one true, one false, neither both; grasping the opposition is one thing, judging which is true another, here by going back to the senses, the very beginning of our knowledge.
• Geometry: “an obtuse angle is greater than an acute angle” is judged by going back to definitions, not to the senses. Right angle is defined not as 90° (why divide a circle into so many parts?) but as the equal angles made when a straight line meets a straight line; obtuse and acute are defined through it as greater and less than a right angle. Definitions are the first beginnings of geometry.
• “Are all right angles equal?” Judged by a beginning before the postulate: lay line on line; if they did not coincide, with letters A, E, C, D, B on the board, AEC = CEB (both right), CEB > DEB (whole greater than part), so AEC > DEB, yet also equal, which is impossible; this goes back to the axiom that the same thing cannot both be and not be at the same time in the same way. (He refers to the theorem he mentioned before, number six, that goes back to whole and part.)
• Ultimately all judgments go back to the senses, which is why we say “that makes sense”, “nonsense.”

5. The ancients: judging is sensing, because like is known by like (“like is sensed and judged by like”) #

Text (§293–295): the ancients say judging and sensing are the same; Empedocles, “skill is increased with what is present… judging always presents something different” (as environment changes, thinking changes); Homer’s half-line, quoted whole by Boethius for Latin readers: the mind of earthly men is such as the day the father brings. Aside: his brother Mark, knocked unconscious mountain-climbing with Brother Edmund, joked afterwards that he “lay there thinking other thoughts” (helicopter, insurance, the lost watch). Thomas’s reason (§295): they assumed understanding bodily, like sensing, and that like is sensed and judged by like; before Anaxagoras all were materialists, so reason was just another bodily sense acted on by its environment.

• The element of truth (recalled from their study of Empedocles: earth by earth, water by water…): the known must be in the knower. “Grasping” itself implies it: the chalk is in his hand, he cannot grasp the centre of the table without cutting it out; you see yourself in someone’s eye; remembering a face, you have its shape and colour inside, got through the eye.
• The difficulty with taking this materially: the chair would know metal because it has metal in it, the other chair wood; Goliath with the stone in his forehead would know a rock better. Aristotle’s correction: the known is in the knower immaterially; even the senses receive with a kind of immateriality, yet in a bodily organ.

6. “Whatever is must be somewhere”: being first known as in material things (“whatever is must be somewhere”) #

Physics IV (Natural Hearing) on place records the common opinion that whatever is must be somewhere, else it does not exist; the man in the street holds it today; CCD children ask “where is God?” and the sisters cannot answer. But place is a property of bodies; God and angels are not in place. The opinion identifies what is with body.

• Thomas after Avicenna: being is what the mind first understands, but being as considered in sensible things; Cajetan: ens concretum in quiditate sensibili. Substance is identified with body because bodies are the only substances manifest at first.
• Link to the reason for many senses (prev. lecture): reason has difficulty separating what never comes separate in experience; only after knowing something immaterial (the unmoved mover at the end of Physics VIII, or reason itself as argued here) has one any reason to separate being from body. Student: “What is that the definition of?” Answer: the being our mind first understands, not the being that is the subject of wisdom.
• Anticipation: the proper object of reason is the what-it-is of something sensed or imagined; so we do not know the what-it-is of what cannot be sensed or imagined, though we know some things about it by negation, analogy and eminence.

7. Digression: why we say both “God is good” and “God is goodness” (“God is goodness itself”) #

Point: our way of speaking, shaped by the mind’s object where form and what has the form are distinct, falls short of God, so both concrete and abstract words are needed and each is denied as to its mode.

• Healthy vs. health: the body has health, is not health; health is not itself healthy but that by which the healthy are healthy; so with colour.
• “God is good” seems to imply a have and a had, some distinction; “God is goodness itself” seems to make Him only that by which things are good. Thomas (Contra Gentiles, Summa) shows both; following Dionysius, we affirm and deny these words of God as to what they signify vs. how. Gospel: “God alone is good,” so good is said of God most strongly.
• God is altogether simple: ST I q. 2 existence, q. 3 simplicity; Aristotle’s fifth book of wisdom on the simplicity of the first cause; St. Teresa of Avila, the closer to God the simpler you become.
• Aside: the Laval dinner honouring De Koninck and Monléon (whose grandfather had met Nietzsche); Monléon said praise Thomas instead, De Koninck topped him: praise Aristotle.

8. Moderns and the brain as organ of thought (“the brain is organ of thought”) #

Moderns are like the ancients in taking the brain as the organ of thought, making reason a body. His former student’s argument, stated for him: a blow on the brain, alcohol, sleep interfere with thinking as a blow on the eye interferes with seeing; the eye is the organ of sight, so the brain is the organ of thought. Reply: a blow on the sole light bulb in a windowless room interferes with my seeing you, yet it is not the organ of sight; you leaving the room, or being blown up, interferes too, yet you are not the organ. So there are two connections a thing can have with knowing: organ, or object. The argument shows the brain is either organ of thought or pertains to its object, but cannot say which. Aristotle will show images (perhaps in the brain) stand to thought on the side of the object, as the exterior thing to sense: I cannot see your colour without you, yet you are not my organ. This is settled only once there are reasons (many) that reason is immaterial. Because we never think without an image, and images are continuous and in time, people think everything is a body; even Catholics who believe in angels fall back into it.

9. The forgotten cause of deception (“deception seems to be more proper”) #

Text: having assigned likeness as the cause of knowing, they should also have spoken of deception, “for this is more proper to animals, and the soul remains in this for a longer time.” He calls this one of the strongest places in Aristotle and Thomas on the prevalence of error in man. Thomas’s expansion, read: animals including man are more apt to be deceived than to be right; men from themselves (ex ipsis) can be deceived and err, and to know truth must be taught by others; the soul is longer in deception than in truth, since truth is hardly reached (vix pervenitur) after long study.

• Evidence: the history of thought, Aristotle’s division of predecessors, one/many, water/air/fire, at best one right. De Koninck: an infinite distance to truth because an infinity of errors lie along the way.
• His logic class: the four if-then forms on the board (affirm/deny antecedent, affirm/deny consequent); four students never once all right; the commonest error, from “if A then B; A is not so” concluding B is not so: “if you robbed the bank today you are a man; you are a man” would jail everyone; a girl’s “if you are a mother you are a woman; you are not a mother; therefore not a woman.” Occasionally even the most obvious form (denying the consequent) is marked “no conclusion.”
• Even Aristotle and Thomas were long mistaken that illumination is instantaneous. Contra Gentiles on imperfect happiness in this life: error is magna pars miseriae. Almost all men are mistaken that reason is immaterial.

10. Is unlikeness the cause of error? (“the same knowledge of opposites”) #

Student: the cause of deception would be unlikeness. He agrees this follows from the probable rule that opposites are causes of opposites, but Aristotle goes on: knowledge of opposites seems the same, and so is error about them: deceived about the sweet, one is deceived about the bitter, not knowing it because it is contrary. The class ends here, mid-argument.

His words #

• Natural Hearing: [ed.: Physics].
• anima / animal: soul named from what the animal does, plant life being hidden.
• manuductio by opposites: leading by hand, here through sleep vs. death.
• grasping vs. judging: two acts of knowing; “understanding” often means grasping.
• judging (for reason): separating the true from the false by some beginning in our knowledge.
• phronein / phronimos: judging, practical wisdom; the man of good judgment.
• sapere / sapientia: to savour, judge; wisdom.
• like is sensed and judged by like: the ancients’ principle (Empedocles).
• ens concretum in quiditate sensibili (Cajetan): being first understood, concretely in a sensible what-it-is.
• proper or private object of reason: the what-it-is of something sensed or imagined.
• negation, analogy, eminence: how we know something of the immaterial.
• affirm and deny (Dionysius): of names said of God, according to what and how they signify.
• ipsa bonitas: goodness itself.
• organ vs. object: the two connections a thing can have with knowing.
• ex ipsis; vix pervenitur; magna pars miseriae: from themselves; hardly does one arrive; a great part of misery.

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, De Anima III.3, opening (Thomas §§293–295), including Empedocles and Homer quotations.
• Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on De Anima III, on §295 (deception more proper to animals; men deceived from themselves).
• Handout, “The First Definition of Reason”, p. 103 (verified; probably the grasping/judging passage). Mentioned
• De Anima I (predecessors; life hidden in plants); De Anima III.4 opening (§322, p. 36).
• Aristotle, Physics IV (place, common opinion); Physics VIII (unmoved mover).
• Aristotle, Metaphysics V (“fifth book of wisdom”, simplicity of first cause).
• Euclid, Elements I, definitions of right, obtuse, acute angle; “theorem number six” (inferred: Prop. 6).
• Empedocles fragment “earth by earth…”; Boethius’ translation of Homer.
• Thomas, ST I qq. 2–3; Summa Contra Gentiles (God’s goodness; happiness not in this life); Avicenna; Cajetan; Dionysius.
• Shakespeare, Henry IV (Hal and the crown), The Tempest; Scripture on sleep; Gospel “God alone is good”; St. Teresa of Avila.

His questions #

• Why is the animal named from anima and the plant left out? Because life in plants is hidden; the soul was investigated through what animals do.
• Which is the perfection of knowing, grasping or judging? Judging, hence attributed to the wise man.
• “Berquist is standing / is not standing”: how do you judge which is true? By going back to the senses, the beginning of our knowledge.
• An obtuse angle is greater than an acute angle: how do you judge that? By going back to the definitions of right, obtuse and acute angle.
• How do you know all right angles are equal? By superposition; otherwise the whole would equal the part, and the same thing would be and not be.
• What is that the definition of (ens concretum in quiditate sensibili)? The being our mind first understands, not the being that is the subject of wisdom.
• Is health itself healthy? No; it is that by which something is healthy.
• A blow on the light bulb interferes with my seeing you; is the bulb the organ of sight? No; it pertains to the object. So the brain argument cannot decide organ from object.
• If likeness causes knowledge, what causes deception? Student: unlikeness. Aristotle’s reply begun: knowledge and error of opposites are the same; left open at the end.