Understanding the One and the Indivisible: Line, Point, Good and Evil, and Reason vs. Sense

Orientation #

He refers back to “the previous reading last week” for the proper object of our reason (the what-it-is of a thing sensed or imagined) and to Aristotle’s mind–matter comparison “in the fifth chapter”. He says he will “just kind of stop here now after five” and “come back and just tie up the end of chapter six”; after the break he announces chapter seven, paragraph 347, corresponding to Thomas’s twelfth reading, with the next chapter to be the thirteenth. The previous class treated the immateriality of intellect and the first two acts of reason in chapter six; the next continues chapter seven on phantasms, practical reason, Mill and the intellectual virtues.

The class, in order #

1. The point is known by negation (“the point is in no way divisible”) #

Point: what has no parts is understood by negation and by comparison to what can be divided.

• Line vs. point: the line is undivided in act but able to be divided; the point has no parts at all. Square (“equilateral and right-angled quadrilateral”): understood all together, yet each part (quadrilateral, equilateral, right-angled) can be understood by itself; not so with the point.
• Euclid defines the point negatively: “that which has no parts.”
• Thomas here alludes to our knowledge of God and the angels, who are simple (not as the point is) and also known negatively. In the Summa, by natural reason, he shows an unmoved mover (already a negation), then in question three shows God altogether simple, all via negativa: no composition of quantitative parts, of matter and form, of genus and difference, of substance and accident, of what a thing is and the thing (individual), no distinction between what God is and His existence. This is opposed to the beatific vision, 1 John (ch. 3, v. 2 as he recalls): “when He appears we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is”; Scripture’s two ways of naming that vision: “as He is” and the more metaphorical “face to face”. In this life we know more what God is not; Dionysius, and Thomas following him: the last thing in our knowledge of God here is that everything said of Him falls short.
• Reason for the negative route: the proper object of our reason (prev. reading) is the what-it-is of a thing sensed or imagined; you cannot sense or imagine a point, only something with extension. So the indivisible is known negatively, the composed before the simple.
• Aristotle compares this to how the soul knows evil or black: by negation of the good. Evil always involves lack of something one should have; your understanding of blindness (something bad) is sight. He flags: “I got to be careful now”: privation vs. negation are different senses of the words.

2. Mind knows potency because it is in potency (“what knows must be in potency”) #

“For some knows these by their contraries… what knows must be in potency, and one contrary must be in it”: a passage that “puzzles people a lot” but has “a very subtle explanation”.

1. Our mind understands potency or ability, at least in part, because it is itself in potency for contraries or opposites (and in a way for the affirmative and negative too).
2. Reason is able to know and to be mistaken: the slave boy in the dialogue first thinks you double a square by doubling the side, later knows the diagonal is the side of the double square.
3. So our reason is a little like matter, as said before (the proportion): “she loves me, she loves me not” plucking petals; the mind can think she loves him and then that she does not, going back and forth. Other instances: doubt about a spouse’s fidelity; the rich girl asking whether he loves her or her money; spouses seeking assurance of love.

• Divine mind, by contrast (“if in something there is not a contrary among the causes… this knows itself, and it is in act, and it is entirely separate from matter”): pure act, never in potency, completely immaterial and so completely understandable; God understands Himself as much as He is understandable and in understanding Himself understands everything else, being its cause.
• His teaching device: Aristotle’s critique of Plato for confusing matter with lack of form is like confusing the mind with its ignorance, the ability to know with ignorance. He finds the mind–matter comparison “very useful”; Aristotle used it earlier in the fifth chapter.

3. After the break: everything good is in some way bad (“What is good is in some way bad”) #

Every good can be seen as bad (it prevents some other good) and every bad as good in a diminished way; hence we choose the bad or omit the good.

• Not going to Sunday mass because it interferes with sleeping; murder gets rid of an annoyance or gains power or a position; robbing the bank is unjust but increases the money in your pocket “if you don’t get caught”; studying prevents the pizza party and sleep.
• Two businessmen hunting when he was a boy: gun went off, one killed, the other took his position; “could have been accident”, but suspicions. An Alec Guinness film where he bumps off relatives to inherit (the suffragette in the balloon, the couple in the boat drifting over the mill), ironically caught at the end.

4. Simply vs. in some way: Meno, Socrates, Descartes, politics, Rhetoric (“in some way, right? Because he says”) #

The fallacy of simply vs. in some respect (haplōs / secundum quid), one of the thirteen kinds of mistakes in the Sophistical Refutations, and how common it is.

• Meno: Socrates wants them to investigate what they don’t know (what virtue is); Meno asks how you can aim at what you don’t know (like asking the way to the filling station without saying where you are going); how then can there be arts like logic that direct us to knowing what we don’t know?
• Socrates makes the same kind of mistake differently: he claims the conversation shows the slave boy already knew how to double a square, when he was actually mistaken; he didn’t know but was able to know. Is being able to know knowing simply? No.
• Students: if you know length and width of a rectangle, “do you know the area?” They say yes; but before multiplying you don’t know it, you are able to know it. Man and woman “have a baby”: able to have one is not having one; tell the priest you “have a baby” and you’ll be misunderstood.
• Descartes: saying the clear and distinct is more known confuses what is more known haplōs (by nature) with what is more known to us (pros hēmas; secundum quid). Meno and Socrates err about the road of reason (studied in logic); Descartes errs about the natural road: the road of geometry is best haplōs but not best for every science.
• Politics: best government haplōs (requires circumstances kat’ euchēn, “according to a prayer or wish”) vs. best for most men vs. best for these people; primitive or disordered people might need a strong government. Democracy and oligarchy [ed.: transcript “autograph”]: men equal in some way, then haplōs equal; unequal in some way, then haplōs unequal.
• Student: does “simply / in some respect” have more than one sense? Many ways something can be “in some way”.
• Rhetoric example (mentioned before): the likely man to commit a crime is unlikely to have committed it, since a criminal doesn’t want to be caught and the obvious suspect gets caught. If sound, detectives wouldn’t look at likely suspects first, but they do; the likely man is likely to have done it, and unlikely only in a very limited way. If he insures his wife heavily and she dies, he is likely to have done it. A further Aristotle example is garbled: [unclear in recording] (“teach your parents”), something very much secundum quid. Most people don’t recognise this mistake when it is made.

5. Noēma and logos; thought and image (“they do have a word for thought too”) #

Greek has noēma for thought; Aristotle says the true and false lie in a synthesis noēmatōn, elsewhere symplokē noēmatōn; St John uses logos instead.

• Thomas on the fitness of the Second Person becoming man rather than Father or Spirit: likeness between man (animal with reason) and the Word; logos is also the word for reason, a link between Word and man.
• His Empedocles vs. Anaxagoras comparison: is mindless love and hate or a greater mind the better guess for the mover? Which separates better, hate or mind? “Was it hate that split the atom?” Reason separates, even in mathematics: extension, number, shape from sensible matter. Love might unite more than mind; but Empedocles says the four elements form flesh, blood, bone in different ratios, and logos / ratio is the word for reason in both languages, so putting together in a ratio is mind’s work. Bartender’s “mixology” named from logos; Manhattan and Stinger are two-to-one ratios: he need not love them, his reason must know the ratio. Reason knows the ratio or order of one thing to another (Shakespeare, he says).
• Logos is more concrete (first meaning the sensible spoken word); noēma more abstract. Partridge on “thought”: little sensible origin, but “methinks” = “it seems to me”, like phantasm (“it appears”); so image and thought are alike and confused, as chapter eight will distinguish them. English “I think / I imagine that’s so”; Locke’s “idea” runs the two together: a philosopher’s idea should be a thought; “don’t get ideas” means images.

6. Chapter seven: the sensible makes the sensitive in act (“the sensible appears to make the sensitive”) #

Aristotle compares reason with the senses, chiefly with regard to the practical, the good, after recalling how the senses are acted upon by their objects.

• Senses are abilities acted upon by their objects (colour on eye, sound on ear, flavour on tongue), coming to know actually. But “the sense does not suffer” nor is “altered” in the original meaning.
• Natural Hearing book I: all predecessors hold change is between contraries; Heraclitus’s induction (the dry moistened, the wet dried, the hard softened, the soft hardened): alteration loses one quality to gain the opposite. Sensing is not this: not from contrary to contrary but from ability to act. Hence “another species of motion”, spoken loosely, since strictly sensing is not motion.
• Ninth book of wisdom: “act” is first said of motion, then carried to form, not by chance but by a likeness of ratios: as body able to move is to moving, so matter able to be formed is to being formed. “That’s kind of fun.”

7. Imperfect act vs. perfect act; form as principle (“I am walking home. I have walked home”) #

Motion in the strict sense vs. operation.

• Imperfect act: walking home — while walking I haven’t walked home; when I have, I’m no longer walking; the activity exists only while incomplete. Building a house, coming into the room, learning, likewise. Grammar (progressive vs. perfect) reflects this most-known kind of act; Shakespeare, “things in motion sooner catch the eye”.
• Perfect act: seeing (when I am seeing you, I have seen you), understanding a triangle, loving. Made most formally in Metaphysics IX; Thomas calls this “operation”.
• Student: how distinguish operation from form? He first distinguishes motion (including any activity: action, activity, act) from form; “act” being first said of activity is a sign. Likeness of ratios: eye closed but not blind is to seeing as wood is to the statue; ability to do is to doing as ability to be formed is to being formed (marble before Michelangelo to the Pietà). So act and ability are not used purely equivocally. Seeing is more like motion than like form.
• De Potentia: form connects with motion as end result of a motion (shaping wood, stamping metal) or as source of activity (the formed mind can act; form completes nature): again not equivocal.
• Student: does operation include the form acquired and its acquisition? No: form is a principle of operation; what sense or reason receives is a form, through which the eye sees and reason understands.
• “A very subtle difference”: “I kick you / I hit you” vs. “I see you / I love you” look grammatically alike, but kicking is transitive: it unites me to you, no contact before. Seeing and loving are not what originally unite: the colour has already acted on my eye (proper and common sensibles), the object already impressed my heart, and seeing or loving proceeds from that union. Cupid’s arrow; Teresa of Avila’s love increased by being wounded; “you made a big impression on her” — the object acts on the power.

8. Sense knows good and bad through pleasure and pain; Mill (“as if affirming or denying”) #

Paragraph 348: “sensing is similar to saying or thinking alone, but when there is pleasure or pain, it pursues or avoids as if affirming or denying.”

• Sense first perceives the object; if agreeable to the sense, pleasure follows; if disagreeable, pain. That feeling is in the sensible order what reason’s “this is good / this is bad” is, followed by pursuit or avoidance; hence “as if”.
• Reason vs. sense: reason need not perceive pleasure or pain to say good or bad; it knows good and bad universally and can see reasons apart from pleasure and pain; sense knows good and bad only as agreeable or disagreeable, so as pleasure or pain.
• He returns to this in ethics, reading Mill alongside the Nicomachean Ethics because that is where students come from: pleasure and pain the only criterion of good and bad. Stock objection: a philosophy for beasts, since pleasure and pain are the only criterion the beast has. Mill’s reply, good but not sufficient: “you are the beast” for thinking man has only the beast’s pleasures; those who have experienced both animal and higher human pleasures prefer the higher.
• His extension: distinguish beastly, human and angelic pleasures. Beastly: shared with the beast (eating, drinking, reproduction, sleep, comfort like a cat), but had by man in a more refined way (cooking, French wine sauces; his late cat Tabitha invited to steak night, but without the salt and pepper). Angelic: pleasures of understanding, which man shares imperfectly, having an overshadowed understanding, reason rather than understanding.

His words #

• via negativa / via negationis: knowing God by denying compositions (Summa q.3).
• “see Him as He is” vs. “face to face”: Scripture’s two names for the beatific vision.
• privation vs. negation: different senses; blindness as lack of sight one should have.
• potency, ability: our mind “in potency for contraries” [ed.: potentia].
• haplōs: simply, without qualification; vs. pros hēmas / secundum quid, to us, in some respect.
• kat’ euchēn: “according to a prayer or wish”, the best government haplōs.
• noēma, synthesis / symplokē noēmatōn: thought; putting together / intertwining of thoughts.
• logos / ratio: word, reason, ratio.
• Natural Hearing [ed.: Physics]; ninth book of wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics IX].
• imperfect act vs. perfect act: motion in the strict sense vs. operation (Thomas’s term).
• “made an impression”: the object acting on the power of sense or love.

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, De Anima III.6, paragraphs 344-345 (point, contraries, mind not in potency)
• Aristotle, De Anima III.7, paragraphs 347-348 (Thomas, lectio 12)

Mentioned

• Euclid, definition of the point
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I q.3 (simplicity of God)
• 1 John 3:2 (as he recalls)
• Dionysius (on knowledge of God falling short)
• Plato, Meno (slave boy, Meno’s puzzle)
• Aristotle, Sophistical Refutations (thirteen kinds of mistake)
• Aristotle, Rhetoric (the likely man)
• Aristotle, Politics (best government haplōs) (inferred)
• Descartes (clear and distinct)
• Empedocles, Anaxagoras
• Partridge, etymological dictionary, on “thought”
• Locke on “idea”
• Aristotle, Physics I (Heraclitus, change by contraries)
• Aristotle, Metaphysics IX (act said first of motion)
• Thomas Aquinas, De Potentia (form as end or source of motion)
• Thomas Aquinas, on the fitness of the Son’s incarnation (no locus given)
• Shakespeare, “things in motion sooner catch the eye”
• John Stuart Mill; Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

His questions #

• How is the point defined in Euclid? Negatively: that which has no parts.
• What is our understanding of blindness? Sight, since blindness is a lack of it.
• Why does our mind understand potency? Because it is itself in potency for contraries, like matter.
• If you know the length and width of a rectangle, do you know the area? No, you are able to know it, which is not to know it.
• Which is more able to separate things, hate or mind? Mind: reason, not hate, split the atom and separates in mathematics.
• When I am walking home, have I walked home yet? No: motion is imperfect act; when I am seeing you, I have seen you: perfect act.
• How do you distinguish operation from form? (student) Form is the principle received through which the power sees or understands.
• Why does Aristotle say sense pursues or avoids “as if” affirming or denying? Because sense knows good and bad only as pleasure and pain, not universally as reason does.
• Is Mill’s ethics a philosophy for beasts? Mill’s reply (you are the beast) has some truth; better to distinguish beastly, human and angelic pleasures.