Phantasms and Understanding: Aristotle on Intellect, Mill on Higher Pleasures, and the Five Intellectual Virtues

Orientation #

He picks up in mid-discussion, comparing the pleasures of the senses with those of reason and continuing to read Aristotle’s comparison of sense and reason (“as we were saying before” of the blow to the brain). He says the point that the soul never understands without a phantasm “he’s going to say again in the next reading,” and that whether we can understand separated things “belongs to wisdom to answer.” The previous class began the comparison of sense and reason around paras 347–348; the next takes up chapter 8, the hand as tool of tools and Locke’s triangle.

The class, in order #

1. Three kinds of pleasure and Mill’s answer (“too high for the beasts”) #

Point: pleasures divide into beastly, properly human, and angelic; Mill’s defence against the charge of a “beastly” philosophy only half succeeds.

• Following an article (Oesterle, inferred; on “an evaluation of music” in The Thomist), the pleasures of the fine arts (music, drama, fiction) are too high for beasts and too low for angels, who have no senses or imagination; so they are most proportioned to man, an animal with reason. Three classes: pleasures shared with beasts (more refined in us), properly human ones, ones shared with angels (which they have perfectly).
• Tabitha the pet: sleeps through Mozart but appears at the faintest sound of the refrigerator: shows fine-art pleasure is above the beast.
• Sign that the middle pleasures are proportioned to man: we can enjoy them longer. Three hours of eating fails by the law of diminishing returns (Mark: “the only thing that tastes good is the first sip”); a two-and-a-half-hour Mozart opera is easy; pure understanding for that long is a strain. The angel is always understanding; that God enjoys such pleasure always “compels our wonder,” says Aristotle, because we are only sometimes in that intense state.
• Verdict on Mill: he ranks higher pleasures higher only because those who have tasted both say so (the child thinks candy the greatest good; the man who knows Mozart, Shakespeare, Euclid knows better). Thomas adds: those who cannot taste the higher pleasures go to excess in the lower, since that is all they know. But since Mill’s only criterion of good and bad is pleasure and pain, his philosophy remains “in some sense beastly,” since that is how the senses alone know good and bad; still less beastly than one making eating, drinking and reproducing the greatest goods.
• Aside: the shipping-dock worker asked what he would do if he won the lottery: “find a quiet place and do some studying”; the worker: “I’d get a hair…” [unclear in recording].

2. How reason knows good apart from pleasure (“three steps in a sense”) #

Point: reason affirms good or bad before any pleasure or pain.

• Reason sees the useful and also the noble (what is an end): understanding God is good apart from its being pleasant; being mistaken is bad even for the man pleased with his error.
• Thomas’s three steps in the senses: (1) sense something as suitable or not; (2) experience pleasure or pain; (3) pursue or avoid. Reason, by contrast, affirms good or bad before any pleasure or pain. To enjoy and be pained is to be at work with the sensitive mean [ed.: the common sense].
• The next, obscure sentence, per Thomas: sense desire need not be in a different part of the body from the senses, as Plato had it in the Republic; even in the same part they differ in definition: “their being is other.”

3. The dianoetic soul, discourse, and the Meno (“learning is what recalling”) #

Point: reason’s knowledge is through something else, and “learning is recalling” is true only with distinctions.

• Dianoia: understanding through something else, what Shakespeare calls “discourse.” Beginning of the Posterior Analytics: all dianoetic knowledge is through pre-existing knowledge, and Aristotle there refers back to Plato’s Meno.
• Is learning recalling? For the senses, no: the child tasting chocolate or licorice for the first time knows it immediately, not through anything. For discursive learning, partly: you recall not what you learn but that through which or from which you learn. A new theorem is not recalled, but the things you put together to see it are; likewise the parts of a definition.
• Why Plato never gives the whole truth in one dialogue: he respects a mind that sees part of the truth before the whole. Empedocles: “having seen but a part of life, they boast of having seen the whole”; pride makes men claim more understanding than they have.
• Recalled example (from the definition of the soul): the two probable opinions, that the soul is an immaterial substance independent of body (Platonists, transmigration; Pythagoras stopping a man beating a dog: “I recognize the soul of my dear friend”) vs. that it is an accidental form, the organization of the body. Each sees a part: it is a form (but substantial, not accidental); it is substantial (but not a complete substance). Aristotle brings the parts together.
• Aside: college students with the whole on the page before them still do not see it at once; we see it only gradually.

4. Phantasm, fancy, and the lover, the poet and the madman (“of imagination all compact”) #

Point: the word for images shows the imagination’s role in romantic love and poetry.

• Phantasm gives English “fancy,” which came to mean imagination and also romantic love (“do you fancy her?”). Shakespeare’s sonnet: love puts eyes in the head with “no correspondence with true sight.” Romantic love is not simply sensual love; its object is charm, which appeals to imagination. Keats complains that philosophers take the charm out of things, and rightly, since they appeal only to reason.
• Key passage, Midsummer Night’s Dream: lovers and madmen have “seething brains,” “shaping fantasies that apprehend more than cool reason ever comprehends”; the lunatic, the lover and the poet are “of imagination all compact.” Love’s Labour’s Lost: no poet dared put ink to paper until he had felt love’s sighs.
• Kierkegaard, The Banquet: no man became a poet through his wife; men became poets and saints through the woman they did not get. Dante and Beatrice; Kierkegaard’s broken engagement: unhappy love releases the poet. Plato says the same in the Symposium.
• Aristotle on the poet: he must be euplastos, mouldable, or else a bit of a madman, assuming the character he writes. Dostoevsky pacing while writing Crime and Punishment so that the landlord thought him plotting a murder; the good Catholic actor who, playing Shylock, hated Christians. Lover, poet, madman are tied together by imagination.

5. The proportion: images are to reason as sensibles to sense (“never understands without a phantasm”) #

Point: the thinking soul affirms or denies good and bad on the basis of images, and so never understands without one, yet the understanding is not in the image.

• Para 349: to the thinking soul the phantasms are like the sensibles; when it affirms or denies good or bad, it pursues or avoids. Contrast with 348: the senses pursue or avoid “as if affirming or denying”; only reason affirms or denies, and without passing through pleasure and pain.
• Example: told what a syllogism is (the only argument whose conclusion follows necessarily), reason sees at once that this is good to have, with no felt pleasure; likewise one may see it is good to learn logic without having “tasted” it.
• The third sentence, “whence the soul never understands without a phantasm,” follows from the first sentence of 349, not the second. The proportion: images : reason :: exterior sensible : senses. Take away the painting, the robes, the fire extinguisher, and the colour cannot be seen; take away the imagining, and reason cannot understand what the thing is.
• But this does not mean understanding is in the phantasms any more than seeing is in the painting; what I see is of the garment, my seeing is not in the garment.
• Thomas on Boethius’ De Trinitate, objection: you cannot imagine God, so how think of Him? Answer: by relation to what is imagined, or by negation of it. “God is not a body”: I imagine a body, which I negate; I cannot negate body without understanding it, nor understand it without imagining it. Also by comparison: “the unmoved mover.” It is natural to the soul in the body to turn to images.
• Aside: our thinking depends also on words and on figures (7, 6) when we calculate: something sensible in which we consider.

6. Student questions: what counts as a phantasm; brain and singular (“a glass mountain or a gold mountain”) #

Point: the image reason needs is any image, including from memory, not the poet’s creative image.

• Student: is the phantasm just imagination or does it need memory and experience? Answer: “images” here does not mean the newly formed image of creative imagination (glass mountain, gold mountain, made from mountains and gold one has seen); the image from memory serves. To think what a triangle, a square, a man is, one imagines a triangle, a square, a man.
• Hence a blow to the brain, alcohol, disease affect the images and so the thinking, especially of singulars: Charlie in the package store not knowing Dick after twenty years; Reagan shown his inauguration, not knowing his wife. People wrongly conclude understanding is in the brain; the seeing-in-the-painting comparison again. If one cannot imagine a thing, one either cannot think of it or knows it by negation or comparison.
• Student: Aristotle’s order senses, memory, experience, understanding; experience connected with the collative faculty. Answer: experience compares many singulars of a sort before the agent intellect separates the common; but even afterward, to understand the universal again one must form an image. Do not confuse what is understood with what is imagined: one understands triangle in general while imagining an isosceles or equilateral one. Locke’s error: asking whether the general idea of triangle is isosceles, scalene or equilateral, he says “all and none”; he cannot imagine triangle in general but one can understand it, as the theorem on interior angles shows.

7. Reason as a common term; time, planning, being moved by images (“looking before and after”) #

Point: reason is to images what the common sense is to the outward senses, and by images it deals with past and future and is moved.

• Para 350: as the common sense is the common term of all outward senses (whiteness, sweetness, crunch of sugar all come back to one centre), so reason is common to all things of which there are images. A and B are the sensibles, C and D the phantasms (Thomas).
• Para 351: the intellectual part understands the species in the phantasms. Were the soul an angel with Plato’s world of forms, it would know them independently of sense; being the form of a body, its object is what-it-is of something in the body.
• Reason can treat past and future because it can image them: planning to see the Elgin Marbles in London. Apart from sensation, concerned with phantasms, it is moved: laughing or groaning at a remembered folly (the graduate student and the toilet that would not stop). Aristotle: sensing the town on fire, one acts; reason does the same from images, planning to pursue or avoid what is foreseen.
• Shakespeare: man has a sense of time; reason is “looking before and after”; Aristotle in the Categories: the first meaning of before and after is in time. Man lives in time more than other animals, which live in the here and now. The use of reason begins even in beastly pleasures: freshmen get sick from beer more than seniors because they do not look before and after; putting off the dentist means more suffering in the long run. Not the highest use of reason, but its beginning, even on the Epicurean principle of maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain.

8. Looking reason and practical reason (“simply in relation to someone”) #

Point: one reason, two purposes; the looking is more universal, the practical singular and ad hoc.

• Para 352: they differ “by considering things simply / in relation to someone.” Looking reason [ed.: theoretical, speculative; both words originally mean looking] has truth for its end; practical reason has doing or making.
• Thomas in the Summa divides Aristotle’s five intellectual virtues (Ethics VI): of looking reason, nous / intellectus / natural understanding, epistēmē / scientia / reasoned-out understanding, sophia / sapientia / wisdom; of practical reason, prudence (foresight) and art.
• Car-dealer news magazines: “no permanent friends or enemies, just permanent interests”; Iraq our friend against Iran, now our enemy; England with Austria and Germany against France in the Napoleonic wars, with France against them in the world wars. Who a friend is changes; what a friend is does not.
• Second book of wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics II]: truth belongs primarily to wisdom; the truth practical reason deals with is contingent, while looking reason concerns what is always true (the triangle’s angles). Aristotle sometimes says looking reason becomes practical by extension to singulars. Proem to wisdom: the man of experience may succeed better than the man of art, since one cures not man but this man.

9. Abstract things and the separated things (“the snub not as snub”) #

Point: reason understands material things without their matter, a sign of its immateriality; whether it can understand wholly immaterial things is left to wisdom.

• Para 353: the mind thinks the abstract things as one understands the snub not as snub but as curve, without the flesh: Aristotle’s stock example, Socrates’ own nose. Snub nose has cartilage; curve has no matter. Mathematical things are not separable in existence (against Plato’s mathematical world) but are understood as separated; no falsity in understanding cube without wood or ice, sphere without earth or rubber ball. To say such things exist on their own because understood without matter is the Platonic mistake.
• That we understand things found only in matter without matter is a sign of the immateriality of our understanding.
• Para 354: whether the mind, not itself separated from magnitude, can understand something among the separated things (angels, God) is left for later; it belongs to wisdom, where one first asks whether there are immaterial things and only then how we know them.

His words #

• human pleasures: those of the fine arts, too high for beasts, too low for angels, proper to man.
• law of diminishing returns: applied to bodily pleasure.
• dianoetic soul / dianoia: understanding through something else; Shakespeare’s “discourse.”
• learning is recalling: true of that through which one learns, not of what one learns.
• phantasms / images: he prefers the Latin-derived “images”; source of English “fancy.”
• euplastos: the mouldable poet who can take on a character.
• the proportion: images : reason :: exterior sensible : senses.
• collative faculty: the student’s term for what compares singulars in experience.
• agent intellect: “the acting upon understanding, so-called.”
• looking reason [ed.: speculative/theoretical intellect] vs practical reason.
• natural understanding / reasoned-out understanding / wisdom: nous–intellectus, epistēmē–scientia, sophia–sapientia.
• foresight [ed.: prudence]; art.
• looking before and after: Shakespeare’s account of reason.

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, De Anima III, paras 348–354 in the translation used (with Thomas’s commentary): affirming/denying good and bad; the dianoetic soul and phantasms; reason as common term (A, B, C, D); species in phantasms, past and future, being moved; looking vs practical reason; the snub and the curve; the separated things.
• Verified handout: “Follow the Common,” p. 11 (about 9 minutes read from it).
• Empedocles fragment (“having seen but a part of life…”) — DHB Vol I, p. 54 (verified source, probably).

Mentioned

• Oesterle (inferred), article on an evaluation of music, The Thomist; J. S. Mill on higher and lower pleasures.
• Plato, Republic (senses and desire in different parts of the body); Meno; Symposium.
• Aristotle, Posterior Analytics (beginning); Categories (before and after); Nicomachean Ethics VI; “second book of wisdom” and “proem to wisdom” (Metaphysics, inferred); Aristotle on the poet (Poetics, inferred).
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (division of the five intellectual virtues); commentary on Boethius’ De Trinitate (objection: God cannot be imagined).
• Shakespeare: a sonnet (“what eyes hath love put in my head”), Midsummer Night’s Dream, Love’s Labour’s Lost; Keats; Kierkegaard, The Banquet; Dante; Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment; Locke on the general idea of triangle.

His questions #

• Is Mill’s philosophy a beastly one? Partly answered by his higher pleasures, but still beastly insofar as pleasure and pain are his only criterion.
• Is it true that learning is recalling? Not for the senses; for discursive learning, one recalls that through which one learns, not what one learns.
• Why does Plato never give the whole truth in a dialogue? He respects a mind that sees part before whole.
• How can we think about God if we cannot imagine Him? By negation of, relation to, or comparison with what we imagine.
• Is the phantasm just imagination, or does it require memory and experience? (student) Any image, including from memory; not the creative image.
• Does dependence on images mean understanding is in the brain? No, no more than seeing is in the painting.
• How do looking reason and practical reason differ? Same reason, different ends: truth and the universal vs doing and the singular.
• Why do we understand material things without matter? Because of the understanding itself: a sign of its immateriality.
• Can the mind, not separated from magnitude, understand separated things? Left open here; belongs to wisdom.