How the Senses and Reason Are Acted On Differently, Two Kinds of Ability, and What Reason Knows

Orientation #

He opens by summarising “up to this point”: Aristotle has compared understanding to sensing as an undergoing, then shown that the receiving in understanding is not in the body (prev. lecture). He closes by promising to “come back to three twenty-nine and three thirty,” the second part of what Thomas calls chapter four, where the object of reason is treated more precisely; a stray closing fragment about St Francis knowing Franciscans and “an act of will” opens the topic of the next class. The previous class argued the immateriality of intellect from the soul as “place of species”; the next continues 329-330 on “what it was to be” a thing, after a discussion of angelic knowledge of thoughts. (Note: the text-matching system lists two handouts and two printed volumes as matched; nothing in the transcript names them, and the class is plainly reading De Anima III with Thomas’s commentary, so I follow the transcript.)

The class, in order #

1. The likeness to sense “should not be overextended” (“the impassibility is not similar”) #

Point: the last paragraph of the reading marks a difference in the way sense and reason undergo their objects. He reads/renders the text: the sense cannot sense after sensing what is very sensible, “as sound after a great sound,” nor see or smell after strong colour or smell; but when the mind understands something very understandable it understands lesser things “not less, but rather more.” Argument for the difference:

1. The senses have a bodily organ, so they are affected as matter is affected; a very strong object destroys or temporarily interrupts the organ’s operation.
2. Reason has no organ, so it cannot be affected that way at all.
3. Hence, having understood something very understandable, it turns to something lesser and finds it easy. Examples of the sense side: highly seasoned food or chili at a wine tasting vs. bland bread (strong taste blocks lesser tastes); a bright light temporarily blinding; the riveter in the factory who is “actually deaf to that sound,” so not hearing better but worse for the great sound; his friend Jimmy hard of hearing in the ear that got hit boxing; kids going deaf from loud music; women often tasting and smelling better than men, attributed partly to men seasoning their food more and “burning their taste buds out” (even wine tasters find women smell things men cannot). Examples of the reason side: freshmen at Thomas Aquinas College find the first books of Euclid hard, but after later books and harder subjects those early theorems seem “awfully easy” (his own students, given a Euclid theorem, complain to the dean); his own habit of reading a couple of theorems of Euclid in bed to relax after reading about the Trinity or the Incarnation. Aside on music: music is rational “by participation,” not essentially; the best philosophers he has known (Assiter, De Koninck, Dion) all recognised Mozart as the best composer and the 18th century’s superiority over the Romantics, who “are not aiming at being reasonable” (he cites Austin Farrell’s essays toward the evaluation of music); the point is that studying the higher, more understandable things does not hinder but sharpens judgment of these less understandable ones.

2. Next lectio, first paragraph: how reason goes “from ability to act” (“not in the same way as before learning or discovering”) #

Point: Aristotle returns to the earlier distinction of first act and second act to clarify that reason’s passage from potency to act is doubled. He renders the text: when the mind “comes to be each thing, as a knower according to act is said to do,” which happens when it is able to work through itself when it wants to, it is still in potency in some way, “but not in the same way as before learning or discovering”; and then it is able to understand itself. He flags the last clause as almost an aside here, to be taken up “in that difficulty at 331”: reason must understand something else before it understands itself. Distinction: first ability (before discovering or learning, when there is a struggle and you cannot think of the thing when you want) vs. second ability (after you have really learned or discovered it, you can think of it “whenever you want” but are not always doing so); correspondingly, first act (possession of the science) vs. second act (actually thinking about what the science is about). Examples: able to know the Pythagorean theorem on the first day of geometry vs. able to think it at will after going through the proof (he re-proves it on the board during final exams so as not to forget it); the apostles asking “Teach us how to pray” and being given the words of the Our Father, memorised so it can be used at will though not always being said (Luke has a little less than Matthew; Mark and John lack it; we follow Matthew’s words); his own use of Thomas’s Adoro te devote, memorised and said before Mass in a chapel (the latest Pope quoted it in his Holy Thursday address to priests, mainly on penance). Student: “second ability and first act are really the same.” Reply: yes, but you are not looking at the same aspect when you say both. Why it matters for ethics: is happiness the habit (virtue) or the act proceeding from and in accordance with virtue? Aristotle will not say the habit is happiness; virtue enables you to do the act well. Comparison with the senses: in the senses the first act comes with generation, by nature, and one is ready for second act at once; reason must first acquire the habit before the act can be perfect, “that’s why sensing is easier than understanding.” The angel is like one already in first act: its mind, as Dionysius says, is “filled with forms” from creation, whereas we must acquire them; and the angel is always actually understanding something, “but I don’t know if we’re always understanding much.”

3. Summary of the first part; turning to 329-330 (“what is that object of reason”) #

Point: the first of three parts is finished: reason is an ability acted upon by its object, and because it can receive all material natures it can have no material nature itself, just as the senses lack the objects they receive. In 329-330, “very brief but very profound,” Aristotle says what that object is; Thomas’s commentary is needed to unfold it (Kierkegaard: a book would not be so long if it were not so short).

4. “What was to be”: a thing and what it is are not the same (“magnitude and what a magnitude is”) #

Point: the text begins, “since magnitude is other than being magnitude, and water than being water,” and he explains the phrase and why it is true. The phrase: Aristotle, speaking of definition, says “what was to be,” then contracts it to “what being” (as sometimes translated); clearer for us: “what a magnitude is,” “what water is.” Why “what was to be”: in Natural Hearing II, distinguishing the four causes, the first and most known, matter, is defined as that from which something comes to be and which exists within it (metal in the metal chair, wood in the wooden chair, bricks in the fireplace). But what came to be (chair, bookcase, table) is finally determined not by the material but by the form or shape the carpenter, metal worker or bricklayer gave; so “what it was to be” is determined by the form. The two examples are significant: one from mathematics (magnitude; he substitutes a circle or a square), one from natural philosophy (water; he adds man, dog). Argument that the thing and what-it-is differ:

1. If Socrates and what a man is were entirely the same, then to be a man would be to be Socrates.
2. But Socrates is not the only man.
3. So they differ. Likewise Champion, Gene Autry’s horse (which he saw as a boy at the rodeo, and whose hoofprint his son saw in the cement in Los Angeles): if to be a horse were to be Champion, Champion would be the only horse. The cat Moppet in the room: what a cat is is common to all cats, so not identical with Moppet, though Moppet is a cat. The circle: if this circle and what a circle is were identical, there could not be two circles, and you could not get through Euclid I.1, which constructs an equilateral triangle by two circles. Conclusion, which he calls “something very profound that most people have never seen clearly”: in natural things and mathematical things, or more generally in things sensed or imagined, the thing and what it is are not identical.

5. Reason’s own object: the what-it-is of a thing sensed or imagined (“reason’s own object is the what it is”) #

Point: sense and imagination know directly a man, a dog, a body of water, a circle or square; reason knows what a circle is, what a square is, and in defining leaves out what is singular (“I don’t say it’s something here rather than there,” since that distinguishes one circle from another). Consequence he draws: reason does not understand what a thing is that cannot be sensed or imagined; it may know something about such a thing, but only by reasoning from things sensed or imagined, speaking by likeness and negating what belongs to those things. Application to God:

• We first understand what a body is, reason from bodies to God’s existence, and then say God is “not a body”; we understand more what God is not than what He is.
• Even grammatically affirmative words, “God is simple” (the first thing in q. 3 after actual existence; St Teresa of Avila: God is altogether simple, and the closer you come to God the simpler you become), are shown by Thomas by negation: not composed as a body, not of matter and form, not composed in any way.
• This natural knowledge is distinguished from the beatific vision, “seeing Him as He is” (St John, ch. 3 v. 2: we are children of God, it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we shall be like Him for we shall see Him as He is) and “face to face”: immediate but supernatural knowledge, not the natural knowledge Aristotle treats. Why no name is adequate to God (Dionysius, followed by Thomas):
• “God is good” implies He has goodness, a distinction of haver and had, but there is none in God.
• “God is goodness” seems to say He is that by which something is good rather than good Himself.
• Neither fits, yet we cannot avoid both: He is good, and He is goodness because there is no composition between God and His goodness (“God is whatever He has”). Root of the difficulty: our words reflect our mind’s natural object, things sensed or imagined, where what a thing is and what has it differ (composition of matter and form); hence the pair of concrete and abstract words: good/goodness, healthy/health (my body is not health but has health and is healthy), just/justice (I am not justice but have it). One word signifies what is had, the other what has and is named from it. Dionysius: all such words can be both affirmed and denied of God. “Our mind stutters when it talks about God” (Hilary, or “one of those,” he is unsure), because its natural object is not adequate to God.

6. Closing: the division of the chapter and where this leads (“This is a chair, right?”) #

Point: he repeats the test with the chair in the room (if this chair and what a chair is were identical, there would be only one chair, “we’d really have a fight”) and locates the reading: Thomas divides chapter four into two parts, the first showing reason is in potency to and receives its object, the second (329-330) saying more precisely what the object is. His summary formula: reason’s own object is the what-it-is of a thing sensed or imagined; this is why natural philosophy and mathematical philosophy are the two basic kinds of philosophy, and why the early Greeks thought there was nothing but what can be sensed or imagined. Trailing fragment (recording ends mid-sentence): St Francis may know all Franciscans, Dominic all Dominicans, as fathers with a certain providence over them; “if you make an act of will, opening into your thoughts…” [unclear in recording].

His words #

• “undergoing”, “receiving”: Aristotle’s account of both sensing and understanding as passive [ed.: passio]
• “impassibility… not similar in the sensitive and intellectual parts”: his rendering of the text
• “ability” / “inability”: potency [ed.: potentia]; “first ability” and “second ability” vs. “first act” and “second act”
• “rational by participation”: said of music, as against essentially rational things
• “Natural Hearing”: [ed.: Physics]
• “matter”: that from which something comes to be and which exists within it
• “what was to be” / “what being”: Aristotle’s phrase for the definition [ed.: to ti en einai, quod quid erat esse]; clearer as “what a circle is,” “what water is”
• “the what it is of a thing sensed or imagined”: his formula for reason’s own object
• “haver and had”: his terms for the composition reflected in concrete vs. abstract words (good/goodness)
• “our mind stutters” about God: attributed to Hilary, uncertainly

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, De Anima III, ch. 4: the passage on the impassibility of sense and mind; the first paragraph of the next lectio in Thomas (double potency); the opening of nn. 329-330 (“since magnitude is other than being magnitude, and water than being water”)

Mentioned

• Thomas Aquinas, commentary on De Anima III, nn. 329, 330, 331 (the “difficulty” on reason understanding itself)
• Aristotle, Natural Hearing II, the four causes and the definition of matter
• Euclid, Elements: Book I, prop. 1 (equilateral triangle by two circles); the Pythagorean theorem
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I, q. 3 (simplicity of God)
• 1 John 3:2 (as he cites it, “chapter three verse two”)
• The Our Father in Matthew and Luke (Mark and John lack it)
• Thomas Aquinas, Adoro te devote; the Pope’s Holy Thursday address to priests
• Dionysius on angels “filled with forms” and on names affirmed and denied of God
• St Teresa of Avila on God’s simplicity
• Austin Farrell, essays toward the evaluation of music
• Kierkegaard’s remark on long books

His questions #

• Why does a strong sensible dull the sense while a very understandable object makes lesser things easier? Because the senses have a material organ that can be injured or interrupted, and reason has no organ.
• How does reason go from ability to act? Is it just ability and act? No: there is a double ability and double act, before and after learning or discovering, as with first and second act in the senses.
• Aren’t second ability and first act really the same? (student) Yes, but not under the same aspect.
• Is happiness a habit, or an act proceeding from and in accordance with virtue? The act; Aristotle will not say virtue, the habit, is happiness.
• Is Socrates (or Champion, or Moppet, or this circle) the same as what a man (horse, cat, circle) is? No; otherwise there could be only one man, horse, cat or circle.
• What does “magnitude is other than being magnitude, and water than being water” mean? That a thing and what it is are not identical, in mathematical and natural things alike.
• What is reason’s own object? The what-it-is of a thing sensed or imagined.
• Why do we speak of God as both “good” and “goodness,” and why does no name fit? Because our words reflect the haver/had composition of sensed things, while in God there is no composition; so, with Dionysius, we affirm and deny each name.