De Anima III.8: The Soul Is in Some Way All Things – the Hand as Tool of Tools, and Locke's General Triangle

Orientation #

He opens finishing a remark from before the break (St Paul caught up to the third heaven, withdrawn from his senses) and then begins “chapter eight”, the chapter “concluding the consideration of both the senses and reason”. He refers back to the proemium of the book and to “that fragment on the mind from Anaxagoras” that “we had” (prev. lecture, not resolved by the context block). The VERIFIED SOURCES matched his handout “Note for Book One, Reading Nine” (Physics I, Aquinas lectio 9) for about ten minutes, presumably the Anaxagoras / “everything in everything” stretch; the transcript itself is a reading of De Anima chapter 8, paragraphs 356-359 of his text. The previous class closed on the five intellectual virtues and the next continues the distinction of imagination from thought around images being neither true nor false.

The class, in order #

1. Opening prayer and the point of chapter 8 (“the soul is somehow all beings”) #

The chapter sums up what was said about the soul: the soul is “somehow all beings” (Greek just says panta, “all”), since beings are either sensibles or understandables, and science is in some way the knowable, sense the sensible.

• Aside: the prayer is said late; a priest who consecrated the blood before the bread, an image of forgetting in old age (“Alzheimer’s”).

2. Empedocles’ half-truth and the two corrections (“we know earth by earth”) #

Point: the earlier philosophers already said the soul is all things, but in the wrong way.

1. Empedocles: we know earth by earth, water by water, love by love, hate by hate, because we are composed of all these; so we know them all.
2. Aristotle keeps the element of truth (the soul is somehow all things) but corrects it on two counts:
   • (a) things are not in the soul actually to begin with but only in ability [ed.: potency]. “Science and sense are divided to correspond to things”, and things (ninth book of wisdom) are divided by act and ability: the eye is able to receive all colours, the ear all sounds, the tongue all flavours, reason the natures of all material things; later each actually receives them. What is in ability answers to what is in ability, what is in act to what is in act. So the sensing and scientific parts are these things in potency, not composed of them.
   • (b) they are not in the soul in a material way but in an immaterial, formal way (356): “either the things themselves or the species”, and certainly not the things, “for the stone is not in the soul”.

• Examples: on Empedocles’ view a wooden chair would know what wood is; his favourite, Goliath, who when the stone struck his forehead should have understood stone better, but “was through knowing at that point”. “Aristotle would like my example of Goliath.”

3. The soul is like the hand (“the hand is the tool of tools”) #

Point: the comparison of soul to hand shows the openness of soul to all forms.

• Hand vs. claw or paw: the paw is a definite tool, fit for a limited number of tasks (cat’s retractable claws for catching a mouse or bird, scratching the dog’s nose to defend itself, and usually winning); the hand is the tool of tools, able to make all tools (hammer, saw, knife) and to use them (knife, fork, pen, paintbrush, spoon for soup, saw).
• Anaxagoras (as reported by Aristotle in the biological works): man is most intelligent because he has a hand. Aristotle reverses it: man has a hand because he is most intelligent; reason knows an infinity of things and so can do an infinity of things, so it would be inappropriate to have a hammer or pen fixed at the end of the arm, which would make him for one thing only. So “the hand and reason are made for each other.”
• The text: as the hand is the tool of tools, so the mind is the species of species and sense the species of sensibles; the soul is “the form of all forms”, able to receive all forms and in a sense to make all forms understandable. “A marvelous comparison.”
• Evidence in the body itself that man is not determined to some part of the world: a biologist told him one can see from man’s body that “he doesn’t have a niche in nature” (fish fits the water, ape’s hands are for swinging in trees).
• Words likewise are compared to reason: with words we signify just about anything; the cat’s meows and purr signify only a limited number of things.

4. Why knowledge of the soul is high; the unlimited (“the whole is better than the part”) #

Point: the proemium said knowledge of the soul ranks high because of its object and its certainty; part of the reason is now visible: the soul, most of all the human soul, is in some way all things, and the whole is better than the part.

• Man receives the natures of all things in the material world, and in the form of a definition, distinctly; “it’s kind of wonderful” that man is not limited.
• Anaxagoras’s fragment on mind says first that it is unlimited; something unlimited already in the hand, a fortiori in reason.
• The universal covers an infinity: “no odd number is even” covers three, five, seven, nine… “the rest of your life”. The senses are less open: the eye receives all colours but only colour; the common sense, receiving all the sensibles, is more like reason.

5. Reason’s dependence on the senses restated (357) (“no one not sensing can learn or understand”) #

Point: since nothing separated beyond sensible magnitudes is known directly, the understandables (mathematicals in abstraction, and states and passions of sensibles) are in the sensible species.

• As he sees the red in the object, so he considers what a triangle is in the image he imagines. And not only in first acquiring: whenever one considers, even after learning, one must imagine a triangle again.
• Phantasms are to reason as the exterior sensible is to sense, except that the exterior sensible is material and the image already somehow immaterial.

6. Digression: Locke and the Glorious Revolution (“the philosopher of the Glorious Revolution”) #

Point: 358-359 distinguish imagination, so closely tied to thinking, from thought; Locke is his example of one who confuses them. A student asks what the Glorious Revolution is; he runs through the Stuarts: James VI of Scotland becoming James I after Elizabeth; Charles I, who loses his head in the civil war; Cromwell, violently anti-Catholic, in Ireland; the restoration of “the Playboy” Charles II from France (rumoured deathbed reception of a priest); James II with real Catholic ties, so William and Mary brought over (about 1688). The Stuart monument in St Peter’s, and what the English make of it. Locke justified these arrangements, wrote the letter on toleration (“except for Catholics”), and with Montesquieu influenced our forefathers (Madison). But the concern here is his natural philosophy: he confuses the image with the thought.

7. Locke’s general idea of triangle (“all of these and none of these”) #

Point: Locke, attacking the claim that the general is more known to us, argues that general ideas are difficult, taking “the general idea of triangle” (the word “idea” lends itself to the confusion of thought and image).

1. The general idea of triangle: a plane figure contained by three straight lines.
2. Straight lines must be equal or unequal. If you imagine the three equal, it does not fit the scalene; if unequal, not the equilateral. So it must be all of these and none.
3. Likewise the angle at which two sides meet must be right, obtuse or acute; whichever you imagine excludes the others. So Locke ends: the general idea is all and none of these.

• Berkeley quotes that very paragraph in the Principles of Human Understanding, says it makes no sense, and concludes we have no general ideas: “that’s his mistake”. Locke’s mistake is to think the general idea is got by “ramming together” the clear ideas of equilateral, isosceles and scalene, like getting man in general by ramming together a white, a black and a yellow man and asking which colour man in general is.
• His answer (with the class): the three lines are equal and unequal, equilateral, isosceles and scalene, all in ability, but none in act. “Locke doesn’t understand ability”: what is in something in ability he falsely imagines to be actually there.

8. Weizsäcker: you cannot imagine ability (“when we imagine something, we make it actual”) #

Point: the root of the error is that imagination makes actual whatever it imagines; ability cannot be imagined any more than sensed.

• A ball player on the field, a great pianist sitting down: you do not see his ability but what he does because of it. Reason understands ability in relation to act; the senses and imagination do not know one thing in order or ratio to another.
• Weizsäcker: physicist, pupil of Heisenberg, who explained why the sun can burn so long.

9. The same error in Anaxagoras, the physicists, and Socrates (“everything is inside of everything”) #

Point: Locke’s problem is Anaxagoras’s.

• Anaxagoras: nothing comes from nothing, so what comes out of matter must actually be in it; he fails to distinguish all being there in ability from one being there in act. Clay: sphere, cube, cylinder, pyramid, an infinity of shapes in ability, only one in act. Hence “everything inside of everything”, which runs into the limit on how small things can get.
• Heisenberg’s introduction to the unified field theory: the formula among students of elementary particles, “every elementary particle is composed of all the rest”, because out of any you can eventually get all the rest; same problem, particles getting smaller and smaller, against experience of each having a definite mass and size.
• Socrates in the Meno makes the same mistake: the slave boy “already knew” how to double a square because it came out of what he knew; but he was mistaken at first and only able to know it. Knowing length and width, do you actually know the area? Not until you multiply, though you are able to.
• Getting something out of something not actually in it: no blood from a turnip, no money from his pocket (nothing there); a chair from the next room (actually there); yet chairs from trees. “Sounds crazy at first”, but it is not getting something from nothing, since ability is not nothing, contrary to the Megarians read in Book Nine of Wisdom, who denied ability.

10. Back to Locke: the general is a little like matter (“all these in ability, none in act”) #

Point: the three straight lines include all the kinds of triangle in ability, none in act; so the general resembles matter, a different kind of ability, but with a similarity.

• Man in general is able to be white, yellow, black, brown, none in act. Number in general: neither odd nor even in act, both in ability; and there are theorems about number in general, e.g. a number is either a part or parts of another number, the lesser of the greater, said of neither odd nor even but of number.
• Two ways to state the difficulty: (i) trying to imagine ability, you make actual what is not actual and so falsify it; (ii) confusing the image of a triangle with the thought. Any triangle imagined or drawn on the board must be equilateral, isosceles or scalene, not all and none; but you can understand what is common to all, leaving aside the differences, though you cannot imagine it. When demonstrating in general, what you understand “is not exactly imagination, is it?” The class ends there, the distinction of 358-359 still to be completed.

His words #

• all beings / all things: his rendering of Greek panta, “all”.
• understandables: the objects of reason, as against sensibles [ed.: intelligibles].
• ability: what things are “in” before they are actually received [ed.: potency, potentia]; “ability is not nothing”.
• species: form, “the species of species”, “form of forms”.
• ninth book of wisdom: [ed.: Metaphysics IX].
• tool of tools: the hand, in contrast to the definite tool that a paw or claw is.
• niche in nature: a biologist’s phrase for the bodily determination man lacks.
• common sense: the interior sense receiving all the sensibles, “more like reason”.
• phantasms / images: to reason what the exterior sensible is to sense, but already somehow immaterial.
• general idea: Locke’s term, used because it lends itself to confusing thought with image.
• ram together: Locke’s supposed way of forming a general idea from particular ones.
• Megarians: those in Book Nine who “thought there’s no such thing as ability”.

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, De Anima, chapter 8 (book III inferred), his numbered paragraphs 355(?)-359: soul as all things; species not things; hand as tool of tools; the understandables in the sensible species; the imagination/thought distinction begun.
• Locke on the general idea of triangle (Essay, inferred), retold in detail; Berkeley, Principles of Human Understanding, quoting that paragraph.

Mentioned

• Empedocles (knowing like by like); Anaxagoras (fragment on mind as unlimited; everything in everything; the hand, via Aristotle’s biological works).
• Aristotle, proemium of De Anima (knowledge of the soul ranks high); Metaphysics IX (“ninth book of wisdom”: act and ability, Megarians).
• Plato, Meno (slave boy doubling the square).
• Weizsäcker on imagining as making actual; Heisenberg’s introduction to the unified field theory.
• Locke’s letter on toleration; Montesquieu; Madison; St Paul’s third heaven; the Stuart monument in St Peter’s.

His questions #

• In what way is the soul all things: is it actually composed of all things, as Empedocles thought? No; all things are in it only in ability, and immaterially, as species, not as the things themselves.
• Why is the soul like the hand? The paw is a definite tool; the hand is the tool of tools, making and using all tools, as the soul is the form of forms.
• Does man have a hand because he is intelligent, or is he intelligent because he has a hand? Aristotle against Anaxagoras: he has a hand because reason can know and do an infinity of things.
• How many things does “no odd number is even” cover? An infinity; you could go through them the rest of your life.
• Are the three straight lines in the definition of triangle equal or unequal? Both, and all three kinds of triangle, in ability; none in act.
• When you watch a ball player or a pianist, do you see his ability? No, you see what he does because of his ability; reason grasps ability through act, imagination cannot.
• Are all the shapes actually in the clay? Only in ability; one is there in act.
• Did the slave boy already know how to double a square? No; he was able to know it, which is not the same as actually knowing.
• Can you get something out of something not actually in it? Yes (chairs from trees), and this is not getting something from nothing, since ability is not nothing.
• Is man in general white, yellow or black; number in general odd or even? Able to be all, none in act; theorems are said of number in general.