Knowing in Some Way, Choosing the Apparent Good, and the Deliberative Imagination

Orientation #

He opens mid-text (“it goes on here on the next page”) and recalls that “we talked about the fallacies” earlier in logic, and that “we saw before” the aisthētikē phantasia; he also promises the students will “see how we get to the ninth book of wisdom” later. He takes a break before “the 16th reading in Thomas” at n. 380. A text-matching system reports his handouts “A Note on Practical Philosophy” p. 9 and “Matter of the Syllogism” p. 4 as read from in this audio; the transcript itself does not name them. The previous class treated appetite and mind as the two sources of motion (De Anima III.10), and the next concludes book three and proposes the Summa’s treatise on the soul.

The class, in order #

1. The kind of mistake Aristotle points to (“mixing up what is so simply”) #

Point: the immediate pleasant “appears to be both simply pleasant and simply good because of not seeing what is to come” — Aristotle is naming a specific fallacy.

• Sophistical Refutations divides mistakes from language (six; first is mixing senses of a word) from mistakes outside language (seven). Examples of the first: “Happiness is the end of human life; the end of human life is death; therefore happiness is death”; a final-exam student: “if nature acts for an end, all things would come to an end.”
• Outside language: first is the fallacy of the accidental (as such vs. by happening); the second is the one he is touching upon here: not distinguishing what is so simply (without qualification) from what is so in some way. “People don’t understand [it] too well” because they overlook the distinction.

2. Knowing in some way: the brother Marcus, Meno, counting (“Do you know my brother Marcus”) #

Point: the distinction is illustrated on the side of knowledge, where it resolves Meno’s paradox.

• Classroom sophism: a girl says she doesn’t know his brother Marcus; she does know what a man is; “that’s what my brother Marcus is” — no real contradiction: simply she doesn’t know him; in knowing what a man (or a brother) is she knows him, and every man, in some way.
• Meno: after Socrates shows Meno doesn’t know what virtue is and proposes to search together, Meno asks how you can look for what you don’t know. Gas-station attendant: “I can’t tell you how to get there if I don’t know where you’re going.” If Meno were right there would be no logikē or logistikē, arts that direct us to what we don’t know. Answer: what you don’t know you can know in some way.
• Counting: nobody knows how many students are in class; he counts and reaches 28 “with the greatest ease” though he didn’t know he was looking for 28 — 28 was known imperfectly as “the number of students in class today.”
• Socrates’ own version of the mistake: he says the slave boy already knew how to double a square because the answer came out of his answers. But the boy first said “double the side” (mistaken); he came to know through things already known. Rectangle: knowing length, width and how to multiply, one knows the area only “in ability” — in some way, not before multiplying. In that sense students know everything he will say before he says it; “learning is coming to know simply.”
• Knocking at a windowless door: you don’t know who is knocking; it is your mother or Father Driscoll — you know them, yet not as “the one knocking.”
• A student’s question: if he knows what he seeks, why ask? if not, how can anyone help? He knows the answer “in a certain way.” Likewise the man paid to find the cause of cancer knows what he is looking for in some way, else why pay him.
• Aside: the final mistake about the universe — matter rather than God as the beginning of all things — is of this kind; “we’ll see how we get to the ninth book of wisdom.”

3. The same mistake all day long in moral life (“choosing something bad because in some way it’s good”) #

Point: sin is this fallacy in action — choosing what is bad because in some way good, or refusing what is good because in some way bad.

• Bad chosen as good-in-some-way: robbing a bank (more money if not caught); murder (removes an annoyance, opens a promotion); drinking a delicious poison (delicious, but bad); abortion (embarrassment, career).
• Good refused as bad-in-some-way: skipping Sunday mass for an hour’s sleep; not studying because it prevents the party or the movie. “There’s nothing in this world so good that doesn’t prevent you from doing something else which is good.”
• Greek: phainetai … to … hēdu kai haplōs hēdu [ed.: garbled; Aristotle’s “the pleasant here appears simply pleasant and simply good”] — “because of not seeing the future.” Fornication is pleasant to the senses, but weighed against disease or hell it is not good; looking only at the here and now one takes good-in-some-way for good simply. Anger: hitting relieves the anger now, but injures the other and lands you in trouble; better to let the insult roll off than to say the nasty thing you’ll regret.
• Exercise: good for you, but in some way bad (painful, uncomfortable), so put off; Ron McArthur’s doctor found nothing wrong except no exercise.
• Ethics: “the man who sins is mistaken”; this seems the most common kind of mistake he makes.

4. The order of movers (nn. 378-379) (“there is the mover, that by which it moves”) #

Point: the rest of the chapter unfolds the order among the movers.

• First and altogether first: the good or desirable itself, “in a way the unmoved mover in this series”; it moves without being moved, by being understood or imagined and desired. In number the movers are many.
• n. 378, three things: (1) the mover; (2) that by which it moves — the bodily part, wings, legs, fins; (3) the thing moved, the animal.
• The mover is twofold: immobile mover = the practical good understood/imagined and desired vs. moved mover = the desiring power, moved insofar as it desires. Appetite in act is “a certain motion,” but as activity, not motion in the original sense.
• The organ by which appetite moves is bodily, so it belongs to the works common to body and soul, reserved to On the Motion of Animals and On the Progression of Animals; here the soul is considered in itself: understanding or imagination and desire, with the good before them.
• n. 379 merely anticipates that: the circular aspect of the arm extending and returning, moving by pushing and pulling.
• Break.

5. Lectio 16: every imagination rational or sensitive (n. 380) (“Every imagination is either logistikē”) #

Point: the animal moves itself as desiring, but not without imagination, and imagination divides by whether reason directs it.

• Man’s imagination is in some way directed by his reason (logistikē) vs. the other animals’ imagination is merely a sense power (aisthētikē); “of this the other zōa partake.”
• The cat in the basement comes up, down the hall and around the corner to her dishes: she can’t sense around the corner, but has an image of where her food is — aisthētikē, not logistikē.

6. The imperfect animals fixed in the ocean (n. 381, inferred) (“these animals that resemble plants”) #

Point: whether imagination is in animals that do not move from place to place.

• Sight, hearing, smell know at a distance (vultures smelling a dead body far off; ants coming to something sweet spilt); these plant-like animals act only through something like touch, food coming by the motion of the water.
• They show pain and pleasure (retract when stuck, grab what is edible), “whence in these necessarily there is also desire” — epithumia, which he translates “sense desire.”
• Imagination was defined earlier as a motion caused by the senses in act; so Aristotle does not deny them imagination but grants an indeterminate, confused image, unlike the more determined imagination of a dog or cat that must direct itself over a distance; they are “fumbling with what’s immediate.”

7. Sensitive vs. deliberative imagination, and the three kinds of goods (n. 382) (“It’s necessary to measure by one”) #

Point: the deliberative imagination of the rational animal combines many images into one and judges by a third thing.

• Sensitive imagination in the other animals vs. deliberative in those having reason: “should I do this or that” is already reason’s work; to decide between two you need a third by which to measure both — three things combined in imagination, as Thomas says — pursuing the greater or better.
• Illustration from this week’s reading of the Apology: the Greek division of man’s goods — goods of the soul (moral and rational virtues), goods of the body (health, strength, beauty), exterior goods (clothing, house, car, shoes). Aristotle treats it explicitly in Politics VII, noting two agreements: everyone knows the three kinds (sign: “early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise”; laws about building, health, schooling), and everyone knows we need some of all three. The disagreement: Socrates — get as much as you can of the goods of the soul, the minimum necessary of the rest (St. Paul: a little food and a little to put on) vs. the Athenians — get as much as you can of body and outside goods, the minimum of soul-goods needed to acquire and keep them (“a fool and his money are soon parted”).
• Judging by a third thing: (i) if God is better than man and the soul is more Godlike than the body, the goods of the soul are better; (ii) if man is better than the beast, it is not by the goods he shares with the beast, so soul-goods are better.
• Hence the other animals, unable to make one imagination from many, seem to have no opinions and nothing from a syllogism; appetite does not have the deliberative power.

8. When the lower wins out: the universal must be applied to the singular (“the universal doesn’t move us to action”) #

Point: sometimes in man the lower moves the higher, because the singular is closer to action.

• Aristotle’s comparison to the old theory of the heavens, lower spheres moved by higher: sense desire moved by reason and will = the continent or self-controlled man vs. reason and will moved by sense desire = the incontinent man.
• The scientific power, knowing universals, “remains” unmoved; the universal doesn’t move us until applied to the particular — the source of man’s conflict, especially since original sin.
• Back-reference to “the framing of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics I, inferred]: the man of experience may succeed better than the man of science since art is of the universal, experience of the singular, and what you do is singular; the doctor cures not man but this man. His wife, given the standard Demerol dose after childbirth, got a headache and learned to ask for half — prescribing better for herself than the doctor.
• Reason’s object is the what-it-is, hence the universal; senses and imagination know the singular directly and so are closer to action. The senses know good as agreeable or disagreeable, not under universal reason; so one may pursue the pleasant singular (fornication, adultery, excess) or shirk the painful one (defending the country, feeding the kid, changing the diaper, helping someone in need) without listening to the universal.
• Temptation is this conflict: “fornication is bad; this is fornication; therefore I should not do it” — but at the moment of choosing one fails to apply the universal.
• Abortion supporters never put abortion under murder; “a woman’s right to choose” is a fiction. Courts contradict themselves: killing a pregnant woman’s baby by beating is homicide, but the abortionist’s killing is a right — both are taking the life of an innocent human being. Cf. Socrates finding you in a contradiction, or Perry Mason catching a witness.
• The universal moves remotely, knowledge of the singular proximately; where the moral law is no longer taught there is no universal to apply — moral chaos, “do what you feel like doing.” Class ends mid-sentence.

His words #

• simply / without qualification vs. in some way: the second fallacy outside language; the sinner’s mistake
• fallacy of the accidental: mixing up as such and by happening
• logikē, logistikē: arts that direct us to knowing what we don’t know [ed.: logic and calculation]
• “in ability”: knowing the area before multiplying [ed.: in potency]
• unmoved mover / moved mover: the good desired vs. the desiring power
• practical good: the immobile mover
• epithumia: rendered “sense desire” to mark the kind of desire
• logistikē vs. aisthētikē phantasia: rational (reason-directed) vs. sensitive imagination
• imagination: a motion caused by the senses in act
• incontinent vs. continent (self-control): sense desire ruling reason vs. reason ruling sense desire
• “the framing of wisdom”: his back-reference for the experience/art contrast

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on De Anima III, lectio 15 nn. 378-379 (order of movers; arm pushing and pulling)
• Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on De Anima III, lectio 16 nn. 380-382 (kinds of imagination; imperfect animals; deliberative imagination; universal and singular), with the Greek of De Anima III.10-11 (inferred) Mentioned
• Aristotle, Sophistical Refutations (six mistakes from language, seven outside)
• Plato, Meno (Meno’s paradox; the slave boy)
• Plato, Apology (division of goods)
• Aristotle, Politics VII (three kinds of goods)
• Aristotle, Ethics (the man who sins is mistaken)
• Aristotle, On the Motion of Animals; On the Progression of Animals
• “the books of wisdom,” ninth book (matter as beginning of all things) [ed.: Metaphysics, inferred]
• St. Paul (a little food and clothing suffice)

His questions #

• Has she really contradicted herself (not knowing my brother Marcus while knowing what a man is)? No: simply she doesn’t know him, in some way she does.
• Is it possible to direct yourself to what you don’t know? Yes, because you know it in some imperfect way, as 28 was known as “the number in class.”
• Does knowing length, width and how to multiply mean I know the area? Only “in ability,” in some way — not simply.
• Does a student who asks a question know what he wants to know? In a certain way, yes; otherwise he could neither ask nor be helped.
• Is it good to drink a delicious poison? No, bad; but good in some way — hence chosen.
• Can the cat sense around the corner? No; she has an image of where the food is — sensitive imagination.
• How could imagination be in the plant-like animals? An indeterminate, confused motion following on touch, since they show pleasure and pain.
• Who’s right, Socrates or the Athenians, about which goods are better? Socrates: judged by a third thing (God, or man vs. beast), the goods of the soul are better.
• Why does man have this conflict in action? Because the universal does not move until applied to the singular, and the senses know the singular directly.