Reason Is Most Man; What Imagination Is Not (Aristotle's De Anima, Reading 5)

Orientation #

He says the fifth and sixth readings, taking up the rest of this chapter, “bring us right to the door of reason,” and “we won’t get to reason until next time.” He refers back to understanding having been shown different from sensing “in the previous reading” and to what he said “in the earlier reading we saw last time” (prev. lecture). The previous class distinguished sensing from understanding and imagination from thought, and the next treats imagination positively as a motion left by sensation.

The class, in order #

1. Opening aside: reason is more you than your emotions (“reason more than anything else is man”) #

The point: before treating imagination he sets the destination, Aristotle’s saying in the Nicomachean Ethics that reason more than anything else is man, and gives signs everybody accepts.

• Students first say their emotions are “more them.” Sign against this: a man gets angry, says what he regrets, and apologizes next day: “I wasn’t myself, I lost control of myself.” But something was in control, namely anger. So when emotion rules you have lost control of yourself; when reason rules, you are in control.
• Joe in the bar about to fight: “Joe, get control of yourself.” Anger controls Joe, so Joe is not in control of himself.
• Judge or jury, other things equal: a crime of passion (man finds another with his wife) is judged less severely than premeditated murder, because in the latter you had time to think it out and really chose; in sudden emotion reason is less involved.
• You start a fight sooner by calling a man stupid than wicked, though wickedness is worse; people sometimes rejoice in their wickedness, as if they identify with their reason more than with their “heart, where their wickedness is.”

Plan for the day: the Greek word is phantasia; the fifth reading (n. 304) argues what imagining is not, the sixth (n. 318) what it is.

2. n. 304: “it appears to me”; power or habit; the four by which we judge (“some image comes to be in us”) #

The point: Aristotle sets up imagination as one of the things by which we discern true and false, and lists the candidates.

• Understanding differs from sensing (previous reading); “of this, one seems to be imagination, following upon sensing, and the other belief”; imagination first.
• “If imagination is that according to which we say some image comes to be in us,” not metaphorically. English parallel: “it appears to me,” “it seems to me,” which sounds like a discernment between true and false.
• Then it is “some one power [or] habit” of those by which we discern and speak truly or falsely. He deliberately leaves open power vs. habit (disposition of a power).
• Translation note: in the next sentence the Greek has no word “powers”; it says only “these are,” the pronoun referring back to “power or habit.” The translator “stuck in” the word.
• The four: sense, opinion, science, understanding, listed because already identified before, at least by Plato.

3. Digression: Plato, the Pythagoreans, and the numbers one to four (“I got your number”) #

The point: Plato, a partial follower of the Pythagoreans, ties these four to the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4 (in De Anima I, “which we didn’t read much of”); the class works out the likenesses.

• Pythagoreans: everything is number; Aristotle too sees some truth in it (he cites “the eighth book of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics VIII]). 1+2+3+4 = 10, and “no one knows exactly why we count to ten and start over.”
• Asides: “I got your number” may be Pythagorean in origin; his own affinity for five (“likeness is the cause of love”); the soul as a self-moving number; virtues as numbers. Is justice odd or even? Even: “are we even now,” “get even with somebody.”
• The likenesses, in his order:
  1. Understanding = 1: known without reasoning, e.g. a whole is more than a part; “something obvious right away.”
  2. Science (epistēmē, reasoned-out knowledge) = 2: from premises to conclusion, as in geometry (angles opposite equal sides of an isosceles triangle are equal); Euclid never reasons to the opposite.
  3. Opinion = 3: premises and two opposite conclusions, “is so” and “is not so”; in the Meno Socrates reasons that virtue can be taught and that it cannot. A student restates: premises and two possible, opposing conclusions.
  4. Sense = 4: “kind of subtle.” A student offers “the body”; he confirms: two points determine a line, a third off the line a surface, a fourth off the surface a body; the senses are bodies. Another student: “because they’re bodily and material” — “the same thing, in a way.”
• Student: is 1 what we’ve been calling natural understanding? Yes; Greek nous, Latin habitus intellectus [ed.: spelling repaired]. Thomas points out this is not the power of understanding (which would not be divided against these); these are dispositions or habits of reason. Sense, though, names more a power; opinion and science definitely name habits; natural understanding could name a power but here rather the habit. That is why Aristotle says “power [or] habit.”

4. n. 306: imagination is not sense (“the main argument is from dreams”) #

The point: three signs that imagining is not sensing (power or act, “like sight or seeing”).

1. Something appears when neither power nor act is present, “the things in sleep.” He calls the text “a little confusing there” but the point clear: in dreaming one is not sensing. His dream: John Paul II in the library stacks singing “Pange Lingua” to a tabernacle, then suddenly talking about ball games — his wife had turned on the radio as he woke; before that he was not sensing, only imagining. “Perhaps the main argument is from dreams, because there it’s very clear.”
2. “Sense is always present in the animals, but not imagination” (the power of sense; we are not always dreaming). If imagination were sense in act, all beasts would have it, but ants, bees, worms seem not to (“I’m not sure if that’s true”). Aristotle’s thought: some animals act only on what is actually present, others on memory, e.g. an animal setting off for its hunting ground, not sensing it but remembering it, acting on images as if sensing them.
3. “The senses are always true, while imaginings are more often false,” false imagination being the chief cause of deception. Accident witnesses: police know to get them to write down what they saw at once; next day the accounts diverge, a sign they follow the leftover, distorted images.

• Further: with certitude we do not say “this appears to me to be a man”; only when we sense unclearly, e.g. “there seems to be a man up there on the hill.” “It appears to me that you are sitting there” would be odd, since it is clear. So sense has a certitude imagining lacks — though the word is used of the senses too at a distance.
• And “something appears even when the eyes are closed.”

5. n. 312: not science or natural understanding (“one of the powers which are always true”) #

The point: a common reason eliminates both together: a real demonstration is necessarily true, and natural understanding likewise, “but imagination is also false.” (Again the translator’s “powers” is questioned.)

6. Not opinion, the closest resemblance (“conviction goes with every opinion”) #

The point: opinion, like imagination, is both true and false, so it remains to examine, and two arguments exclude it.

• Greek pistis, translated “conviction,” the same word as faith, but not supernatural faith here: the mind believing, being convinced.

1. One cannot opine what one is not convinced of; but conviction is in few of the beasts, imagination in many (all the higher animals).
2. (Thomas: backing this up.) Conviction goes with every opinion; conviction comes by having been persuaded; persuasion goes with reason. So no conviction without reason; other animals lack reason but have imagining; therefore imagining is not opinion.

• At this point all four are eliminated.

7. Plato’s Sophist: opinion entwined with sense, and why Aristotle rejects it (“the sun appears to be a foot in diameter”) #

The point: Plato, having only these four kinds of knowing, makes imagining a combination of opinion and sense, “getting fairly close” (Aristotle will say imagining is a motion produced by the senses), but Aristotle rejects it (n. 315: neither opinion with sense, nor opinion through sense, nor an entwining of the two).

1. Supposition: the opinion must be of the very thing sensed, not accidentally: the entwining is of the opinion of white with the sensation of white, not the opinion of good with the sensation of white.
2. Example: the sun appears a foot across (“I can block it out with my hand”), yet one is convinced it is larger than the inhabited earth. If the seeming were an opinion tied to sensing, one would hold two opposite opinions at once — impossible. (Student: “seems that you could … not sure about either.” His reply: if I believe the one, the seeming of the other is opposed to it.)
3. Aristotle’s dilemma: either the true opinion is left behind, though one neither forgets it nor is persuaded otherwise nor thinks the thing changed (an opinion “would become false when it escapes notice that the thing is changing”); or the same thing is both true and false. Therefore imagination is none of these nor from them.

• Simpler example, the optical illusion: two equal straight lines, marks added, the top now seems longer; but is it my opinion it is longer? No. I have not forgotten my reason for thinking them equal, nor think a line is shrinking; so my seeing is not my opinion.
• English usage: “I think Bush will be reelected” vs. “I know” — “I think” marks an opinion of Duane Berquist, not knowledge; and we also say “I imagine he will be,” so the two look close, but “it seems to me the top is longer” is not “I think it is longer.”

8. Digression: the arts of deceiving the eye and the eye of the soul (“13 ways to deceive the students”) #

The point: that there is an art of making lines appear other than they are, like the art in logic of making the false appear true, shows how the eye of the body and the eye of the soul are alike.

• A psychology exhibit in the library of illusions; “Aristotle taught me 13 ways to deceive the students.”
• Trompe l’oeil wallpaper looking carved when flat; an Annunciation in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum whose pavement one looks straight down from either side; his own canal scene “by or after Canaletto” doing the same; painted eyes that follow you round the room, alluded to by Washington Irving in a story of an old English mansion and its superstitious servants; “how do they do that? I don’t really know.”
• Two painters: one paints something to eat and the other reaches for it; in revenge the other paints a curtain with tassel that the first tries to pull.
• The Winter’s Tale: the king falsely accuses his wife, the rumour of her death, her hiding, Paulina’s “statue” that he wants to kiss (“the paint is not yet dry”) and that comes alive — “a marvelous ending.”

9. Recap and break (“appropriate time to take between the fifth and the sixth”) #

So far: imagination is not sensing, not opinion, not natural understanding or demonstrative knowledge, nor a combination of opinion with sensing. Next, what it is.

His words #

• phantasia: the Greek for imagination/imagining.
• “it appears to me,” “it seems to me”: the English for the image coming to be in us, carrying a note of incertitude.
• power or habit: Aristotle leaves open which; “habit” = a disposition of some power.
• understanding (here): what we know without reasoning it out; also natural understanding, Greek nous, Latin habitus intellectus.
• science / epistēmē: reasoned-out knowledge, as in a geometrical demonstration.
• opinion: knowledge not sure, with reason to think it so and not so.
• conviction (pistis): being persuaded, believing; not supernatural faith here.
• “the eighth book of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics VIII].
• “I think” (English): marks an opinion rather than knowledge; “I imagine” used similarly.
• trompe l’oeil: the art of deceiving the eye.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, commentary on De Anima III, fifth reading, nn. 304, 306, 312, 315 (with the Greek behind the translation).
• Aristotle, De Anima III (the text under these numbers).

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (“reason more than anything else is man”).
• Aristotle, De Anima I (the four tied to numbers one to four).
• Aristotle, “eighth book of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics VIII] (truth in Pythagoreanism).
• Plato, Meno (virtue can and cannot be taught).
• Plato, Sophist (imagination as opinion entwined with sense).
• Thomas, sixth reading, n. 318 (imagination as motion produced by the senses; next).
• Weigel’s biography of John Paul II; Washington Irving’s story of an English mansion; Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale.

His questions #

• Which is more you, your reason or your emotions? Reason: when anger controls you, you have lost control of yourself.
• Do you think the virtue of justice is an odd number or an even number? Even — “are we even now,” “get even.”
• Why does four represent the senses? A student: the body; four points specify a body, and the senses are bodies.
• Would the number one be what we’ve called natural understanding? Yes: nous, habitus intellectus, a habit of reason rather than the power.
• Could I have the opinion that the sun is smaller than my hand and larger than the earth at the same time? No (a student demurs); the seeming is not an opinion opposed to my belief.
• Is it my opinion that the top line is longer than the one below? No; my seeing is not my thinking.
• How do painters make the eyes follow you round the room? Left open: “I don’t really know. Do you?”