De Anima III.4: Grasping and Judging, and Why the Mind Is Not a Body

Orientation #

He says the chapter is what “today and probably next time” will cover, and refers back to earlier classes on whether nature acts for an end and on how the senses receive (the marble-vs-eye example) and to the earlier reading from Anaxagoras. The previous class had turned from divine simplicity and whole/part to the interior senses; the next continues chapter 4 on the mind as “place of species.”

The class, in order #

1. Division of the text from chapter 4 on (“by which the soul both knows and judges”) #

Point: where chapter 4 sits in Aristotle’s plan as Thomas divides it.

• Chapter 8 (Thomas’s 13th reading, p. 44 of the class text): summing up, “the soul is somehow all beings,” since beings are either sensible or understandable — that comes after reason has been treated by itself.
• Before that: chapters 4-6 on understanding/reason by itself; chapter 7, second paragraph (Thomas’s 12th reading), compares understanding with the senses.
• Chapters 4-5: the reason that receives (chapter 4), then the active understanding and the result of the two (chapter 5); chapter 6, more detail on the operations of the soul — Thomas returns to it in his Proemium to Logic [ed.: proem to the Posterior Analytics commentary (inferred)].
• Chapter 4 = Thomas’s readings 7, 8, 9: reading 7 into the first paragraph of 8 (n. 328), reason as an undergoing power; reading 8 (n. 329), the object that acts on it; reading 9 (n. 331), a little difficulty. Chapter and reading divisions do not go back to Aristotle.
• This undergoing understanding is what “they call… a possible understanding,” intellectus possibilis.

2. Knowing vs. judging = grasping vs. judging (“it’s one thing to grasp what he’s saying”) #

Point: Thomas sees in “knows and judges” the distinction between grasping (apprehensio) and judging.

• Reading an author: grasping his meaning vs. judging whether it is true or false. Grasping is presupposed to judging: “nature acts for an end” is rejected by people who have not grasped what it means; “interior angles of a triangle equal two right angles” cannot be judged by someone who does not know what a triangle, a right angle, or an angle is.
• His complaint: the greatest difficulty should lie in judging, but with obscure writers (Aristotle’s “theological poets”; Hegel’s letter admitting he writes obscurely so as to seem wiser) one spends the time still unsure what is meant and is “in no position to judge.” Hence: express yourself as clearly and simply as possible.
• Two uses of “understanding” in English: as a part of knowing (= grasping), or as a form of knowing opposed to sensing.
• Asides: De Koninck inserting a meaningless sentence into a public talk and being praised for it — “we admire something we don’t understand”; Sherlock Holmes explaining, “oh, it’s so simple,” yet no one else could figure it out.

3. Judging and its beginnings in the different sciences (“separation of the true from the false”) #

Point: judging is “the separation of the true from the false by some beginning in our knowledge,” and each science judges by going back to a different beginning.

• Natural philosophy: back to the senses — “is Berquist standing?” is judged by looking.
• Geometry: back to the imagination — between two points only one straight line (many curved ones); brother Mark’s remark that Euclid’s fourth theorem is hardly a theorem, since you see the triangles coincide by imagining one laid on the other; the parallel postulate is really about lines that meet (angles less than two right angles), which you can imagine, whereas lines not meeting “extended to infinity” cannot be imagined, only talked about.
• Logic: its most basic object is the universal (Albert the Great), which cannot be sensed or imagined — Locke’s attempt to imagine a triangle common to all (any imagined triangle is equilateral, isosceles or scalene, and singular); young Socrates in the Parmenides picturing the universal as a sheet spread over all, when in fact the whole of what “man” signifies is in each. So logic judges by going back to reason itself; Monsignor Dionne: in this way logic is like the way wisdom judges about immaterial things.
• Theology judges in yet another way — back to scripture, the magisterium, the tradition. “You have to find the way of judging in each science that’s appropriate.”

4. Digression: use the more known, native word (“desiccation is a greater problem”) #

Point: philosophical speech should use the most known word, usually the native one, and intellectual custom has corrupted this.

• Thomas’s Latin is easier than Augustine’s or Cicero’s; in the Golden Chain dedicatory letter to Urban IV he writes ornately, showing he could; in his Psalms commentary he distinguishes three styles.
• Student’s paper: “desiccation” vs. “drying up” — same statement, but the native word also shows what follows (land animals must retain moisture, like a dish towel on the line).
• “Method” comes from hodos, Greek for road; his mother asking why the boys don’t use big words, and then no one could follow — people “say it with their mouth but don’t attain it with their mind” (Thomas).
• Wisdom is “looking philosophy”: theoria (Greek), speculativa (Latin), looking (English); “speculative” now means guessing, “theoretical” means unreal. A theorem is “something to look at.”
• “Metaphysics” is three words, meta ta physika, “after the natural [books],” the title given by Andronicus of Rhodes when cataloguing; Aristotle himself says sophia and “first philosophy.” He would call it “the fourteen books of wisdom” — and you need the three books on the soul first. Aside: bookstores shelving metaphysics with the occult.

5. Back to the text: the order of the words, and Plato’s bodily parts (“first in dignity or perfection”) #

Point: judging comes second in time but first in dignity — hence Aristotle, Boethius and Thomas insist on knowing the way of judging proper to each science.

• “Whether that part be separable or not according to magnitude” alludes (Thomas) to Plato, who in the Republic places reason, the irascible and concupiscible in different parts of the body; Aristotle will show reason is not bodily and so not in one part of the body.
• Plan of the chapter: (a) compare understanding with sensing; (b) from that bring out the nature of understanding — its immateriality; (c) end on the difference between the undergoing of reason and that of the senses.

6. Understanding is like sensing in being an undergoing (“a piece of marble could receive your shape”) #

Point: understanding, like sensing, is a receiving/being-acted-upon, but not the way matter is acted upon.

1. Marble receiving your shape loses its own shape (contrariety, alteration); the eye receives your shape without losing its own — “I receive your shape, not my own.”
2. As eye is acted on by colour and ear by sound, so the understanding is acted on by the understandable.
3. Reason for the likeness: we are able to sense/understand before we actually do; so the object must be received. Against Empedocles, who said we know earth, air, fire, water, love and hate because we are made of them — then we would always know them and need no exterior object; but I never know the taste of licorice without eating it, nor blue without seeing it.

• Why “suffering”/undergoing: the Greek word’s first meaning is a painful receiving contrary to you, later generalized to any receiving. Hence Aristotle’s hesitant phrasing (“either a suffering… or something like this”): sensing is not strictly an alteration.
• “Impassible” here means not changed as matter is (clay sphere moulded into a cube “has undergone”), yet receptive of the species “in potency, not in act.”
• What he stresses: sensing and a fortiori understanding is “more a perfecting of your knowing power rather than a change” — an “increase in what you already are.” He is “not really contradicting himself.”
• Sartre: any receiving opposes sovereignty (“Hell is others”); Gabriel Marcel saw this would make teaching, parenthood, even friendship among equals impossible, since friends act on and perfect each other. Sartre is stuck on the first meaning of undergo.
• Asides: a new teacher reading “why are you doing this to me?” on students’ faces; you are aware of being acted on when jabbed with a pin, not when you see someone; garlic before a meeting.

7. From the likeness to immateriality: the mind must be unmixed (“since it understands all things”) #

Point: as each sense lacks its own object to receive all of it, the mind, able to know all material things, must lack any material nature.

1. Senses: a sugary tongue would taste everything sweet; a green eye would see everything green (Wizard of Oz glasses); a Mozart symphony always in the ear would block other sounds. So each sense lacks what it receives — with the exception of touch, which cannot wholly lack hot and cold and senses what it lacks (weather warmer or colder than it).
2. Anaxagoras: the greater mind ordering nature must be unmixed with matter, else it could not rule it. Illustrated: a judge must be impartial, “not a part of”; command vs. obedience in the army; “Hail to the Chief”; a mother joining her daughter’s party loses authority. Judging separates true from false “by something outside of them.”
3. Aristotle’s argument is “similar but different”: not about a divine or angelic mind but the human, and not so that it might command but “that it might know.” Reason is universal, in ability to know everything in the material world; if it had a definite material nature, “what is present in it would hinder and screen out the others.” So it is dunaton, an ability; “none of the beings in act before it thinks” — exactly contrary to Empedocles.

• The transparent mug: to show blue, red, green, yellow liquids it must be clear; “the mind has to be transparent.”
• “A very fundamental argument, not the only argument by any means, but the fundamental argument” — “the first way to see it.”
• Aside: Anaxagoras was the first Greek to see the mind as immaterial; brought philosophy to Athens, friend of Pericles; Socrates’ excitement on reading him in the Phaedo.

8. “Thinks and assumes”: dianoeitai and hypolambanei (“take up a position and defend it”) #

Point: the two verbs in “that by which the soul thinks and assumes” may carry the grasping/judging distinction; the second, hypolambanei, means “take up.”

• lego de noun ho dianoeitai… kai hypolambanei: dianoia has the idea of discourse, knowing through something else (Aristotle in the Posterior Analytics: dianoetic teaching is through pre-existing knowledge); hypolambanei often means opining; “assume” (Latin) = “take up” etymologically.
• Take up is the counterpart of “laid down” in the definition of syllogism: speech in which, some statements laid down, another follows necessarily; before laying a statement down you must take it up. The dialectical premise is “an asking of the probable”: the answerer takes up affirmative or negative (cat is/is not four-footed; earth flat or round; water H2O or simple), otherwise it is a problem, not a premise; one can take up without strictly knowing. Likewise in defining: take up the genus of square (quadrilateral), then the differences (right-angled, equilateral), and lay them down. [Verified source: handout “Reasoning and the Four Kinds of Argument,” p. 6, probably read here.]
• “Laid down” best explained by Thomas in the commentaries on St Paul: something else lays it down, it implies firmness and order to something further — “laying down the law” (bed by nine; practical reason expecting conformity); in the syllogism premises are laid down firmly, else if the major “runs away” while you take up the minor you cannot syllogize.
• Closing text: “it is reasonable that it is not mixed with the body,” else it would be qualified hot or cold or have a sensitive organ; “but as it is there is none” — the reason being again that it can receive the natures of all material things.

His words #

• grasping; apprehensio; the first of the two things in knowing, presupposed to judging [ed.: apprehension]
• judging; “the separation of the true from the false by some beginning in our knowledge”
• undergoing; his rendering of pati/“suffering,” a receiving, being acted upon [ed.: passion, being passive]
• undergoing understanding / possible understanding; intellectus possibilis [ed.: possible intellect]
• understandable; his word for the intelligible (intelligibilis)
• ability; his word for potency (dunaton) [ed.: potency]
• impassible; not changed in the way matter is, yet receptive
• species of the form; what the receptive mind holds “in potency, not in act”
• unmixed; Anaxagoras’s and Aristotle’s word for the mind’s freedom from any material nature
• looking philosophy; theoria, speculative — wisdom [ed.: theoretical/speculative philosophy]
• meta ta physika; “the books after the books of natural philosophy”; “the fourteen books of wisdom”
• dianoia / dianoetic; knowing through something else, discourse
• hypolambanei; to take up, assume, often opine
• dialectical premise; “an asking of the probable”
• laid down; of premises in the syllogism: firmness and order to a conclusion

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, De Anima III, ch. 4, opening through “as it is, there is none” (class text n. 324)
• Aristotle, De Anima III, ch. 8, first sentence (“the soul is somehow all beings”)
• handout, “Reasoning and the Four Kinds of Argument,” p. 6 (verified source; probably at the syllogism/dialectical-premise passage)

Mentioned

• Thomas, Commentary on De Anima III, lessons 7, 8, 9 (nn. 328, 329, 331), 12, 13
• Thomas, Proemium to logic [ed.: on Posterior Analytics (inferred)]
• Thomas, Golden Chain [ed.: Catena Aurea], dedicatory letter to Urban IV
• Thomas, Commentary on the Psalms (three styles); Commentaries on St Paul (“laid down”)
• Plato, Republic (parts of the soul in parts of the body); Parmenides (universal as a sheet); Phaedo (Socrates on Anaxagoras)
• Aristotle, Posterior Analytics (dianoetic teaching); Aristotle on the “theological poets”
• Euclid, theorem 4 and the parallel postulate
• Empedocles; Anaxagoras; Albert the Great; Locke; Hegel’s letter; Sartre and Gabriel Marcel

His questions #

• In what way is understanding like sensing? In being an undergoing, a receiving of its object — as the eye by colour, so the mind by the understandable.
• What is the reason for saying so? We are able to sense or understand before we actually do; so the object must be received (against Empedocles).
• Does my eye receive your shape the way marble does? No: marble loses its own shape; the eye receives your shape, not its own.
• What does “impassible” mean here? Not changed as matter is, yet receptive of the species.
• How many straight lines between two points? One — seen in the imagination, the beginning of geometry.
• Can you sense or imagine a universal? No; logic must judge by going back to reason itself.
• What’s the first thing we demand of a judge? That he be impartial, “not a part of.”
• Did Aristotle use the word “metaphysics”? (student) No — Andronicus of Rhodes gave the title; Aristotle says sophia and first philosophy.
• Is “thinks and assumes” significant? (student) Probably the grasping/judging distinction; hypolambanei = take up.