Imagination as a Moved Mover: Deception in the Senses (Reading 6)

Orientation #

He opens: “let’s look at the sixth reading now in Thomas here, which is starting in 318 and going to the end here on page 35.” He closes: “next time we’ll start here with chapter four,” readings seven (Thomas “almost the first page”) and eight (nn. 328–330), where Aristotle begins on reason. The previous class worked through the fifth reading, what imagination is not, and stopped at the transition to reading six.

The class, in order #

1. Which “imagination” Aristotle means (“that’s not really what he’s talking about here”) #

Point: the English word misleads; the ordinary sense (the ability to come back upon stored images and manipulate them) is not the sense here.

• Gold mountain / glass mountain (the fairy tale he reads the kids): I have seen gold, glass and mountains, never a gold mountain, but I combine images into a new one. That is the poet’s manipulation of preserved images (memory), not the topic.
• What he means: look at someone, close your eyes, and “you’re still there in front of me,” only faded. Imagining is “something that’s very close to the senses,” which is why Aristotle begins as he does.

2. The moved mover: imagining as a motion from sense (“a moved mover, right? As well as the unmoved mover”) #

Point: Aristotle’s opening (“a thing having been moved, another is moved by this”) recalls the moved mover from the Natural Hearing and applies it to sense.

1. Sensing is a being moved (acted upon) by the exterior object.
2. What is moved can also move: the sense is a moved mover (pool: I push the case, it moves the text; billiard balls passing motion on).
3. A mover moves another in a way like the way it has been moved, so the motion the sense causes “more within” resembles the sensing — “when I close my eyes, I still kind of see you” though my eyes are no longer acted upon.
4. But the communicated motion is weaker (the thrown ball moves what it hits, “not as vigorous”). Conclusion, in Aristotle’s words as he reads them: imagination is a certain motion, not coming to be without sense, in the sensing things and of the objects of sensation; the one having it does and suffers many things due to it and it is both true and false. He now turns to explain the last clause.

3. Recalling the division of the sensible (“the division of the sensible. Remember that?”) #

Point: the three sensibles from before, needed to place deception.

• Sensible as such, divided into (a) private/proper, known by one sense only (blackness of the robe: seen, not heard, smelt, tasted or touched) and (b) common, known by more than one (shape, extension: I see and feel the surface of the desk); vs. sensible by happening (the man). In ordinary speech “I see” all three without distinction.
• Do I see a man as such, or only colour, shape and size, “none of which is the man himself”?
• Aside: why Descartes got mixed up — he made length, width, depth the substance of body; “Descartes never grew up,” since growing up means the same person has a different size, so the person is more fundamental than his size, and the senses know nothing more fundamental than size. “Body” in geometry (a sphere is a body) and “body” in the genus of substance: equivocal but connected.

4. Deception in the senses: n. 319 (“the sensation of the proper sensibles … is true”) #

Point: reading n. 319, the three sensings differ in truth.

• Private sensibles: true, or “at least what has least falsity”; deceived only if the organ is injured or affected (candy or hot food, fever; mother: eat the orange before the candy or it seems bitter; wine tasters and prior food; the stone never feels soft, the pillow never hard; nobody calls the potato chip sweet).
• Accidental sensibles: one is not deceived that the white is, but whether the white is this or something else (salt in the sugar bowl: deceived temporarily, “not for too long”).
• Common sensibles (motion, magnitude, shape and the others): “erring according to sense is greatest” (the 18th-century houses with a false door for symmetry, even deceiving about depth; the stopped train that seems to move; distance across the plains toward Las Vegas, “drive, drive, drive”).
• Student: what is “sensible by happening” again? Not sensed as such but known by something else in us, e.g. reason, when we sense — sugar itself is not perceived, only its colour and shape.
• A lesser sense of “accidental”: what is known by one sense as accidental to another. Shakespeare’s sonnet, “I love to hear my mistress’s voice … although I know that music hath a far more pleasant sound”: the delight is not in the voice as voice but in the person; recognising a loved voice on the telephone vs. Pavarotti; a song or smell recalling a place; disliking a name until you like a person of that name (mother); the student named Champagne.
• Accidental in the strict sense: what no sense as such knows but reason — substance. Substance has the same etymology as understanding: substance stands under the accidents; private sensibles are accidents in the third species of quality, common sensibles belong to the continuous, i.e. quantity, so sense as such does not know substance; the understanding does.
• Aside (Monsignor Dionne): one language sometimes has the better word. Sapientia from savour, which “wisdom” lacks; “the underlying cause”; to understand an effect is to know the cause standing under it; to understand a word is to know what stands under the name placed upon it (Latin impositio nominis [transcript garbled], English “label”); Shakespeare’s pun on ground as cause.

5. Why common more than accidental? the comparison to reason (“A chain is no stronger than its weakest link”) #

Point: he finds it “kind of strange” that common sensibles, sensed as such, deceive more than accidental ones, and supposes it is because reason is present in recognising the man, dog or cat by its shape.

• Comparison: reason is sure of what it knows immediately, more apt to err in what it knows through another, and the more steps the more possibility of mistake (chain and weakest link; computers so complicated that one slip means reinstalling the whole program).
• Sense does not reason, but knows the common sensibles as a modification of the proper (the surface and shape of the desk through its colour spread out and ending here and there), so being more deceived about common than private is like reason’s being more deceived in what it must reason to.
• Illustration: nobody is deceived that the whole exceeds the part, but a student is deceived that more perimeter means more area. His “favourite theorem,” Euclid Book II, Proposition 5: 5×5 has perimeter 20 and area 25; 2×10 has perimeter 24 and area 20 — more fence, less land. The old crooked geometers selling land by perimeter; the Russian story of the man who may keep all the land he runs round in a day and dies of greed (two equal runners: the one who ran longer may enclose less); ship pilots estimating an island’s size by the time to sail round it, absurd with fjords.

6. Imagining deceives in the same way, but more (“you will be deceived in the same way, but even what more so”) #

Point: since the inward motion is weaker, imagining is deceived about the same three, more, and most when the thing is absent or far away.

• Boyhood game: look at a house a few seconds, close your eyes, the others ask how many windows, shutters — often wrong, and weaker the further you get away.
• Hume’s “thoughts are faded sensations”: he is really describing imagining, confusing thought with an inward sensing, and so puts reason down to a lower level.
• Reads top of p. 35: the motion from the act of sense differs as the three sensings do; the first true in the presence of sensation, the others may be false in presence and absence, “mostly when the sensible is far away”; if nothing else has these characteristics, imagination is a motion coming to be from sense according to act — he returns to the definition through this property.
• A fortiori after a day: recalling Shakespeare memorised, then “playing with the words” until, checking the text, “I’m imagining Shakespeare would have said it a little differently than he did.”

7. n. 320, the Greek word (“phos is kind of a contraction of phaos”) #

Point: phantasia comes from light; the verb’s first meaning is “to bring to light”; English “appears,” “seems” is likewise tied to the eye.

• The eye is the most spiritual sense and closest to imagining; we think of the image as a picture, though imagining is not limited to sight.
• Shakespeare, “my eye has played the painter”: the painter stands between the person and what is stored within — a metaphor for the sense moved and moving something further within, more weakly, hence faded and more deceiving.
• Aside: readers in church who look up from the text and misplace words, reading from what they just saw rather than from the page.

8. The last paragraph: acting on images when reason is eclipsed (“men when their reason is what eclipsed”) #

Point: because what remains resembles the sensations, animals do many things by images as by sense; beasts because they lack reason, men because reason is eclipsed by passion, disease (the madman) or sleep (doing in dreams what one would not do awake). He notes this will return after reason is taken up.

• Othello killing his wife, Romeo returning to take his life: dominated by imagination, reason eclipsed by passion; the “sick people” in the newspapers, by disease.
• Aristotle’s Rhetoric, three means of persuasion in his order of importance: the speaker’s image, moving the audience’s emotions and prejudices, and least the arguments or apparent arguments. Iago’s persuasion of Othello follows all three — he projects the image of a careful man who hates to voice suspicion, so Othello trusts his judgment; likewise Mark Antony’s speech.
• Aside: a student named Mark Antony; his father proposing “Marcus Aurelius” for his brother Mark; a summer playmate of that name; Plutarch and the Roman plays.

9. Student: is the definition the last line of 319? (“a motion made by the sense in act”) #

Point: yes — said before, restated there; but one must grasp what it names: look intently at Father Charbel, close your eyes, he continues within, faded; that motion caused more within, while the eye is actually moved, is “the original imagining.”

• Retaining images and manipulating them is the word in another sense and “another power.” Thomas’s reason (going back to earlier thinkers): what easily receives does not retain well and what retains well does not easily receive, so a different kind of body is required.
• The Summa Theologiae on the soul takes up the inward senses that Aristotle does not treat explicitly here; “we may do that sometime.”

10. Student: where exactly is the deception? (“Is there deception in the judgment or in the senses itself?”) #

Point: the student objects that the colours reach him in true proportion (you look bigger than the tree behind); his answer: in a sense it appears so to the senses — the two drawn lines, the lower seems longer — and more so to imagination, being further removed. Statements one makes are another question; if reason followed how it seems, that would be reason deceived by imagination.

• Confirmation: the white of the two lines has not changed even to the eye; a yellow and a blue line are never confused, but length, a common sensible, deceives; optical illusions (the bent line, the computer diagram that seems to go round in a circle) are all built on common sensibles — “a confirmation of what Aristotle is saying.”
• To deceive the private sensibles you must affect the organ or change it: the green glasses in the Wizard of Oz; his sunglasses making the fall foliage more brilliant (he will not wear special glasses to make everything look better); the reformed smoker rediscovering the taste of food; Father Mark’s warning about smoking and taste at the Christian Brothers’ dinners; no Cabernet Sauvignon with pepperoni pizza (a Chianti cuts through); Dr Wallet burning his tongue with coffee before a $1,500 tasting — “at least I can sniff the wine.”

11. Next time (“next time we’ll start here with chapter four”) #

Readings seven and eight (nn. 328–330); two readings per session with a break; Aristotle begins on reason, “universal reason.”

12. Student’s extra question: Summa q. 3 and the word “composed” (“the third question in the Summa Theologiae is about the simplicity of God”) #

Point: theology proceeds by the via negativa; q. 3 negates in the creature’s six kinds of composition, then universally, then that God enters no composition. His list: (1) not a body, i.e. no quantitative parts; (2) no body and soul, matter and form; (3) no nature and individual/subject; (4) no substance and existence; (5) no genus and difference (God in no genus); (6) no substance and accident; (7) universally no composition; (8) God enters into the composition of nothing else. Summa Contra Gentiles reverses the order, general first then particular kinds, “with one exception” not pursued.

• His observation: this is like a question showing God has no parts and is not a part of anything.
• Names of the continuous (beginning, end, before, part) are carried over to the non-continuous. The word “cat”: the average man says its parts are C, A, T and nothing else, since removing them leaves nothing; but “act,” “dog” and “God” have the same letters, so there is something besides the letters — an order — and “part” is now used in a different meaning. Quantitative parts (the cut table, the pie) meet at a common boundary; the letters can be made continuous, but the order and the letters are not.
• “Composed” = compositio, put/placed together, first said of parts that can exist independently and are brought together (assembling the outdoor grill from Spag’s, worth the price difference) — continuous or at least contiguous. Is that how matter and form are put together? The rubber and the spherical shape of a rubber ball — the class ends here, mid-example.

His words #

• imagination (as here): the faded continuation of the seen when the eyes close, a motion caused by the sense as moved mover; vs. imagination as manipulating preserved images (another power).
• moved mover; the sense, moved by the object, moves something within.
• Natural Hearing [ed.: Physics].
• private / proper sensible; common sensible; sensible by happening [ed.: sensible per accidens].
• accidental in the strict sense: known by no sense as such but by reason (substance).
• understanding / substance: same etymology, standing under.
• sapientia: from savour.
• ground: Shakespeare’s word for cause.
• eclipsed: of reason, by passion, disease or sleep.
• phos / phaos, phantasia: bring to light.
• via negativa; compositio: placed together.
• part (first meaning): quantitative part, meeting at a common boundary.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas, Commentary on the De Anima, sixth reading, nn. 318–320 (pp. 34–35 of his text), reading Aristotle’s definition of imagination and the three sensings. Mentioned
• Aristotle, Natural Hearing [Physics], the moved and unmoved mover.
• Euclid, Elements, Book II, Proposition 5.
• Aristotle, Rhetoric, three means of persuasion.
• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 3, aa. 1–8; the questions on the soul (inward senses).
• Thomas, Summa Contra Gentiles (reverse order of the simplicity arguments).
• Shakespeare: sonnet on the mistress’s voice; “my eye has played the painter”; Othello; Romeo and Juliet; Mark Antony’s speech; Plutarch.
• Hume, thoughts as faded sensations; Descartes, body as length, width, depth; Wizard of Oz.

His questions #

• When you use the word imagination in English, what are we usually thinking of? The ability to come back upon our images and manipulate them — not the sense meant here.
• Of the three sensibles, which are the senses hardly ever deceived about? The first, the private sensibles, unless the organ is injured or affected.
• Of the other two, which is more apt to deceive us? The common sensibles, more than the accidental — which he finds strange, and attributes to reason’s presence.
• Do I see a man as such, or only his colour, shape and size? Only colour, shape and size; the man (substance) is known by understanding.
• If a rectangle has more perimeter, does it have more area? No: 2×10 has more perimeter and less area than 5×5.
• Is there deception in the judgment or in the senses themselves? (student) In a sense it appears so to the senses, more so to imagination; reason is deceived only if it follows the appearance.
• What are the parts of the word “cat”? Is there any other part besides the three letters? C, A, T — but “act” shows an order is also there, in another meaning of “part.”
• Is that the way you put together matter and form? Left open (class ends on the rubber ball).