De Anima III.3: Imagining vs. Thinking, the Estimative Power, and Digressions (Trinity, Hegel, Irving)

Orientation #

He says next time will cover 304 to the end of the chapter, Thomas’s lessons five and six, where Aristotle explains what imagining or an image is; after that comes chapter four, the part of the soul by which we think and judge. He recalls “the proemium to wisdom” for the remark at 303 and “when we were doing the Gospel of Saint John” for Thomas on “in the beginning was the Word.” The previous class began Aristotle’s distinction of senses from reason and his critique of earlier thinkers; the next works through Thomas’s fifth reading on what imagination is not.

The class, in order #

1. Sensing and judging not the same (“the one is present in all”) #

The point: Aristotle’s first, preliminary way of distinguishing reason from sense.

1. Sensing is present in all animals; judging in few. Therefore they are not the same. He notes Aristotle is “not trying to be too precise yet,” since some higher animals seem to have something like reason, in that they can judge.

2. Second argument (299): understanding can be false (“sensation of the proper is always true”) #

1. Sensation of the proper sensible is always true and is in all animals.
2. Thinking can occur falsely and is in none that lack reason. Conclusion: understanding, in which there is correct and incorrect, is not sensing. Example: give ten kids candy, all say “sweet”; give something bitter, all react at once; ask them a philosophical question and you get ten answers. So sensing and thinking “could not be the same thing.” He calls this “a very humble way, but a very proportioned way to us” to see the difference.

3. Why imagining vs. thinking is harder (“something like universality”) #

The point: with the outward senses the limits are visible (the eye knows only color, not sweetness, while reason talks about both — its universality); but imagining seems to have “something like universality,” so it is harder to separate from thought. Aristotle will have “very subtle ways” of separating image and thought; “most people can’t separate the two at all.”

• Locke’s “idea”: in English it means sometimes an image, sometimes a thought; the philosopher who says “I’ve got an idea” means a thought, the girl who says the boy “gets ideas” means images.
• Daily speech: “I imagine that’s so” / “I think that’s so” used interchangeably; Shakespeare in the prologue to Henry the Fifth, asking the audience to use imagination for Agincourt on a small stage, goes back and forth between the two words.
• Locke on the general idea of triangle: is it equilateral, isosceles, scalene, right, acute, obtuse? “All and none of these.” Berkeley quotes this, says it makes no sense, so there are no general ideas. His diagnosis: Locke is trying to imagine the general idea, ramming particular images together, hence “all and none.” One can think and define what the three triangles have in common without any of the differences, but cannot imagine it, since any imagined triangle is one or the other. So Locke mixes image and thought — “very common.”
• Hume: thoughts as faded, less vivid images.
• Aside: De Koninck, lecturing on the Physics through Thomas’s commentary, would stop and bring in Bertrand Russell or some modern in the same difficulty as an ancient Greek; the same errors repeat.

4. 300-301: first argument, freedom of imagining (“I’m free to imagine”) #

300 states that imagination differs from both sense and thought, does not come to be without sense, and without it there is no belief. He says “believing” may be better than “thinking” here. Two arguments follow, 301 and 302. First (301):

1. I am free to imagine just about anything, good or bad.
2. I am not free to think just anything; I need a reason to think something is or is not so. Examples: a terrorist with a machine gun outside about to mow us down vs. a man with a cart of drinks coming to give a party — both imaginable; but I cannot think there is a terrorist without a reason. Imagining winning the Massachusetts lottery, fifty million, without having bought a ticket; imagining myself in Rome. Thinking is “something like discourse,” the mind going from one thing to another for a reason — a confirmation of Shakespeare’s definition of reason as the ability for discourse, knowing one thing from another. Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence (we all back in this room, Aristotle giving his lectures, forever): “pure imagination,” no reason for it.

5. 302: second argument, from consequences (“a little bit like seeing in the theater”) #

1. If I thought there was a terrorist outside I would be scared, out the window; imagining one I am “quite brave,” no fear.
2. If I thought I had won fifty million I would go crazy; imagining it, I don’t. Conclusion: a real difference between thinking and imagining. Aristotle: to imagine something good or bad is like seeing it in the theater — someone dying on stage is not someone really dying in front of you.

6. 303 and what comes next (“we don’t have to talk now”) #

303, like an aside in the proemium to wisdom: the differences between science, opinion and prudence are treated elsewhere (Nicomachean Ethics); here he is only concerned with imagining vs. thinking. Next time: 304 to the end of the chapter (Thomas’s lessons five and six), what an image is, which adds to our understanding of sensing; then chapter four.

7. The inward senses: common sense and estimative power (“the animal perceives what something to be a friend”) #

The point: besides the common sense (the common terminus of all the proper sensibles) there is another power — in animals the estimative, in man sometimes “particular reason,” still bodily — which perceives what is not sensible as such: friend or enemy, to be pursued or fled, not because the sense qualities are agreeable or disagreeable but, in Thomas’s phrase, as “the beginning or the end of some passion or action.”

• Roy Monroe’s kitten afraid of a striated belt after playing with plain belts: it looked like a snake, seen as an enemy.
• Mother cat smelling her kittens and feeding them: not because the smell is agreeable.
• Young birds crouching when a big bird flies over: not because the shadow pains them. Student: “Is that instinct?” — yes; Thomas’s term is “estimative power.”
• Thomas is more complete on the inward senses in the Summa Theologiae; “we’ll look at that sometime.”
• Avicenna adds two more powers to retain what these two receive, since in material organs what receives easily does not retain (water takes a shape and loses it) and what receives with difficulty retains (metal). Naming is confusing between Latin and English: Thomas, he thinks, uses “memory” for what retains from the estimative and “imagination” for what retains from the common sense; in English we use “memory” for the wine-taster’s stored tastes (Brother Mark), and “imagination” also for combining and transforming images. “Whatever you name the two powers,” they are the powers that keep.
• His boarded cat hating the kennel, coming out to his hand; the cat at the lake hiding under the bed from a dog: they sniff you out and recognize friend or enemy, not because the smell or shape is pleasing or painful. A lamb knows a wolf the first time; the shape is a common sensible, but the enemy is a per accidens sensible.
• Student: Konrad Lorenz attacked by crows for his black, floppy swimming trunks — they sense “something a little more general than just a black bird.” His brother Mark’s hike with Ron McCarthy, vultures circling the man falling behind: recognized as a possible meal.
• Student: the autistic woman who designs cattle facilities, sees the shadows that frighten cows, thinks in images and cannot understand words like “to be” — the inward senses too strong.
• Cat unmoved by Mozart but reacting to scratching: recognized by this power as to do with hunting. An older cat might not be deceived by the belt; Indians in animal skins accepted by flocks; scarecrows work “initially, birds get smart.”

8. “Part” carried from the continuous to other wholes (“meet at a common boundary”) #

The point: the first meaning of part is quantitative — parts meeting at a common boundary — and the word is carried to the other meanings in the fifth book of wisdom, but those parts do not meet at a boundary and so cannot be separated by cutting.

• Clay and its shape: distinct (you can remold), composed of matter and form, but they do not meet at a common boundary; if they did you could divide them like cutting a line or a page in half. The union of soul and body is before quantity, quantity being an accident; the atheist biologist who “never found the soul” among the parts falsely imagines the soul as cut-off-able.
• Universal whole and subject parts: equilateral, isosceles and scalene triangles meet at no boundary.
• Genus and difference: like matter and form; the difference determines what is already in the genus in ability — “equilateral triangle” is not two sets of three lines. What is outside cannot determine intrinsically (the left side of a line cannot determine the right).
• We fall back on what we can imagine (boundaries: the yard, the street, the neighbor who called the police over a ball). Realizing one thought is not outside another shows the distinction differs from the continuous, which has part outside part.
• Student: we say the soul “leaves the body” at death. Reply: it just stops animating; it is in the body as form in matter, not in place — the fifth sense of “in.” People falsely imagine the soul penetrating the body.
• The likeness by which the word is carried over, then the difference seen: “kind of amazing.” Quadrilateral is only part of my thought of square; we speak of “adding” the difference to the genus as frosting to a cake, but frosting is outside the cake, whereas the difference added to the genus, or the minor premise to the major, is not one here and one there.
• Student: a note said that in speaking of God we drop the genus (“God is just,” drop the habit) — he agrees this is important for understanding God, “not sure how well I understand it.”

9. The footprint of the Trinity and the one (“the property of the one to be a beginning”) #

The point: why Thomas compares the unity of a creature’s substance to the Father.

• Image of the Trinity (in mind): mind, mind understood (its word), mind loved — easier to see. Vestigium (footprint) in irrational creatures, as explained in the Summa Contra Gentiles: substance is one; it has a form; an inclination or order follows on the form. Inclination is like the Holy Spirit (natural desire, the plant seeking water and sunlight); the form is like the Word (we speak of forming thoughts); but why the unity of substance is like the Father “isn’t spelled out.”
• His proposal: in the fifth book of wisdom the property of the one is to be a beginning; the Father is the beginning of the whole Trinity, so beginning, and hence one, is appropriated to the Father. Thomas on John, “in the beginning was the Word,” gives among other readings: in the Father was the Son. The Greeks looked for one beginning; modern physicists (Einstein, Planck) make unity the goal of science.
• Second reason: before and after (Shakespeare’s “look before and after”) are names of the one; among the transcendentals one comes after being and thing but before understandable, true and definition — “he who doesn’t understand one thing understands nothing” (Thomas quoting Aristotle); Heisenberg in the Gifford lectures: to understand the kaleidoscope we need order, hence unity. So if the Father is beginning of the Son per modum intellectus, and only the one is understandable, there are two reasons for one as footprint of the Father: the Father is principium without principium; and the Father begets the Word by way of intellect.
• Hegel: takes “the Word was made flesh” literally, thought becoming matter, then rising to spirit; nobody explains the passage; “crazy, perverse imitation of theology.” Meeting De Koninck at Kasurik’s house before a lecture on Marxism, explaining 1818, Hegel and Marx. Hegel dominated German universities around 1830; later philosophy “a dismembering of the corpse of Hegel”; Nazis and communists as right and left Hegelians; the German priest at the Angelicum told “you’re German, do Hegel.” Hegel writing obscurely on purpose; Heidegger worse.

10. Hegel on tragedy; judgment in the arts (“the opera of operas”) #

Aside-digression: good things in Hegel — Homer’s many-faceted characters vs. one-dimensional French tragic characters, Homer’s simile, his order of the arts (tragedy above music above painting and sculpture) is correct against colleagues who rank painting higher or the Aeneid above Homer. Kierkegaard: Don Giovanni is to opera what the Iliad is to epic, perfect correspondence of content and form; Romeo and Juliet likewise. Monléon: art as determined vs. prudence, the artist’s judgment of the one right word; Dickens’s titles (“Great Expectations”). Washington Irving as master of English style, replacing Addison (C. S. Lewis’s paper), learned through the Sketch Book from his brother Mark; healthy imagination; Irving learned from Goldsmith as Dante from Virgil, yet style “flows from the pen” (Mozart on writing music naturally); Irving’s judgment that Shakespeare “said it all,” and of Mozart’s Don Giovanni.

His words #

• judging: what the higher animals seem able to do, “something like reason”
• proper (sensible): sensation of it “is always true”
• idea (Locke): ambiguous in English between image and thought
• believing: his preferred word for what 300 calls thought or belief
• discourse: knowing one thing from another; Shakespeare’s definition of reason
• estimative power: Thomas’s term for what a student calls instinct; in man “particular reason,” still bodily
• common sense: “the common terminus of all the proper sensibles”
• per accidens sensible: the enemy seen in the wolf’s shape (a common sensible)
• memory / imagination: the two retaining powers (Avicenna); Latin and English usage differ
• fifth book of wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics V]
• ability [ed.: potency]: what the genus has, determined by the difference
• fifth sense of “in”: form in matter; the soul in the body but not in place
• vestigium: footprint of the Trinity in irrational creatures
• per modum intellectus: the Father as beginning of the Son by way of intellect
• principium: beginning; the Father a principium without principium

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, De Anima III ch. 3, paragraphs 298 (sensing and judging), 299, 300, 301, 302, 303 in Thomas’s numbering (Thomas, lectio 4, inferred)

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (science, opinion, prudence)
• Aristotle, proemium to the Metaphysics (“proemium to wisdom”)
• Aristotle, Metaphysics V (part; one and beginning; before and after)
• Thomas, Summa Theologiae (inward senses; locus not stated)
• Thomas, Summa Contra Gentiles (vestigium of the Trinity; locus not stated)
• Thomas, Commentary on John, “in the beginning was the Word”
• Locke on the general idea of triangle; Berkeley’s reply; Hume on faded images
• Shakespeare, Henry V prologue; Hamlet’s “look before and after” (inferred)
• Nietzsche, eternal recurrence; Heisenberg, Gifford lectures; Hegel on Tragedy; Kierkegaard on Don Giovanni; C. S. Lewis on Addison; Irving, Sketch Book, life of Goldsmith

His questions #

• Ten kids given candy all say “sweet”; ask a philosophical question and you get how many answers? Ten — so sensing and thinking cannot be the same.
• Is the general idea of triangle equilateral, isosceles or scalene? Locke: all and none; the error is trying to imagine what can only be thought.
• Am I free to think there is really a terrorist out there? No; I need a reason, though I can freely imagine it.
• Do form and matter meet at a common boundary? No; so they cannot be cut apart like quantitative parts.
• Why should the unity of the substance be compared to the Father? Because the property of the one is to be a beginning, and the Father is the beginning; also because only the one is understandable and the Father begets the Word by way of intellect.
• Is the cat afraid of the dog because its shape is painful to it? No; it recognizes it as to be fled from, by a power other than the common sense.
• Is Hegel being taught in the universities? He dominated them around 1830, and still looms even in Rome; his obscurity was deliberate.