De Anima: The Order Among the Soul's Powers, and the Senses of 'Before' (Why Breathing Isn't Better Than Philosophizing)

Orientation #

He opens by saying that “in these last two chapters” (De Anima III.12–13) Thomas tells us Aristotle will treat the order among the powers; he refers back to “as we saw before” for the object of the understanding soul (the what-it-is of something sensed or imagined) and for nature acting for an end. He breaks before “the thirteenth chapter.” The neighbouring sessions conclude the De Anima reading and announce the move to the Summa’s treatise on the soul.

The class, in order #

1. Order means before and after — but which “before”? (“order, as you know, means what”) #

The point: the order among the powers in these chapters is order in being, not in goodness.

• Order = before and after. He lists the senses in play: before in time, in being, in the discourse of reason (knowledge), in goodness. Which one here?
• Feeding (nutritive) powers are before sense powers in being: plants feed, grow, reproduce without sensing; animals cannot be without feeding/reproducing. Boundary: “feeding” is the concrete English, “nutritive” the Latin.
• But the sensing soul has what the feeding soul has and more; the feeding soul is only a part of it. Which is better, part or whole? The whole. So sensing is better than feeding — order in goodness runs the other way.
• Likewise sensing is before understanding in being: other animals sense without grasping the universal, but the understanding soul’s object is the what-it-is of something sensed or imagined, so (in bodies) it is not without sense. Understanding is to sensing as whole to part.
• Thomas speaks of the soul as a potestative whole: the fullness of power in the understanding soul, a part in the sensing, a part in the feeding (vegetative).

2. Touch before the distance senses; four “befores” (“the sense of touch is before”) #

The point: among sense powers, touch is before those that know at a distance through a medium.

• Taste is “sort of in between” but is a touching power, involving contact.
• Lowly animals fixed to the ocean floor: food comes with the water; stick a pen in them and they react as in pain, take in what touches them — touch without sight/hearing/smell. The cat must go hunting, so it needs senses of distance (insects, vultures, dogs and smell).
• You can lose the other senses (Helen Keller) and live; lose touch and the animal is dead.
• So at least four befores in being, not all explicit in the text. In goodness the reverse: higher senses better than touch, understanding better than sensing, sensing better than feeding.

3. Digression: “getting your priorities straight” (“getting priorities straight involves more than one sense”) #

The point: “priority” is a Latin word for “before,” and people don’t notice it has several senses.

• Buy Shakespeare before comic books: before as better. Feed my family before buying Shakespeare: before in being — “it’s better to read Shakespeare than to eat, but it’s more necessary to eat.”
• Children go to grade school before college: before in the first, second, maybe third sense, but not the fourth (not better).

4. The text on the feeding soul; “necessary” and the second sense of before (“it is necessary, therefore, for everything that lives”) #

The point: the word “necessary” belongs to before-in-being.

• Read: everything living must have the feeding soul from generation to destruction, since what comes to be has growth, maturity, and shrinking (diminution), impossible without food; and without food nothing stays in being. Sense, however, need not be in all living things.
• Cf. the proemium to wisdom (Metaphysics): every other knowledge is more necessary than wisdom, but none is better; hunting and farming are more necessary than wisdom.
• His classroom test: “Which is better, to breathe or to philosophize?” Students say breathe, because otherwise you’d do nothing else. Reply: that shows breathing is before in the second sense (can be without the other, not vice versa), not in the fourth (better). The question asked was “which is better.”
• A student presses: isn’t it correct that breathing is before in the second sense? Yes — but the conclusion was about the fourth.
• Parallels for the illicit slide between senses: Chaucer before Shakespeare in time, therefore better? I know you before your parents (in my knowledge), therefore you are before them in time? Chianti is dry, dry is not wet, therefore Chianti is not wet. Roger Maris hit 61 home runs with a bat; a bat is a flying rodent (“flying mouse, as the Germans call them”).
• “The most common mistake that the human mind makes”; Aristotle in the Sophistical Refutations calls it the most democratic mistake (his Greek term garbled in recording), i.e. the fallacy of equivocation: thinking where there is one word there is one meaning.

5. The stronger argument and its exception (“the opposite of the worse is better”) #

The point: “the opposite of the worse is the better” holds for the most part, but fails when the lesser good is before the greater in being.

1. Usually the opposite of the worse is the better, of the worst the best (probable, for the most part).
2. Exception: when the lesser good is before the greater good in being, the loss of the lesser is worse than the loss of the greater, though the greater remains better.

• Letters vs words: words are better (letters are for their sake; the end and the whole are better), but no letters is worse than no words, since without letters no words.
• Blind vs deaf: worse to go blind, so seeing better than hearing — and here the inference works, because there is no order of being between seeing and hearing (each without the other). Likewise man vs cat: murder worse than killing a cat, so man better; no order of being between them.
• Theological virtues: charity greatest, hope greater than faith; but losing faith is worst of all, since with faith you lose hope and charity, while losing charity you may keep hope and regain charity.
• Bricks vs brick house/patio: the house costs more and is better; but losing bricks loses houses too.
• Plants vs animals: plants for the sake of animals (the Bible: plants appointed for us and the other animals); the animal is more of a whole; but losing plants loses animals — “we could be vegetarians.”
• Eat to live or live to eat? If eating is for living, living is better. Nobody thinks they live for the sake of breathing; so breathing is a means, and the end is always better than the means, whatever your end (eating or philosophizing).
• Priorities again: necessities before non-necessities (starving children get food, not Mother Goose); among non-necessities you buy by “better” (the Bible before a novel, Mozart before Beethoven); the missionary and Mother Teresa feed before instructing; you revive the unconscious man, you don’t philosophize with him. The students think we are naïve to say philosophizing is better than breathing, but they are the ones making the mistake.

6. Aside: a student’s confusion of “end” (“understanding end in the sense of what”) #

• Earlier example (recalled): “nature cannot act for an end, or all things would have come to an end.”
• Recent exam: comparing outside goods, goods of body, goods of soul (Socrates vs the Athenians): outside goods are for the inside goods, so inside are better; goods of soul are better as closer to man’s end, the act with reason according to virtue. The student “Chris” took “end” as end of time — then death would be the best thing in life. The end that makes something better is “that for the sake of which.”

7. Para. 386: a simple body cannot have touch (“that of which the body is simple cannot have touch”) #

The point: touch requires an organ that is a mean between tangible extremes.

• Tongue is not sugary or salty, else everything would taste sugary; the eye’s fluid has no color (a green fluid, as in the Wizard of Oz, would make all look green). But the body cannot be without warmth or hardness, so touch must be a mean between hot and cold, hard and soft, sensing best what differs from the body.
• Shower: you feel the warmth most on entering; once your body warms you feel it less. Ocean: cold at first, “fine once you get in.” Skin against the table corner dents and springs back — neither whipped cream nor glass or stone.
• Higher animals, especially man (best sense of touch), have a near-constant body temperature; lower forms lack it and sense hot and cold less.
• The simple bodies (earth, air, fire, water) are extremes (fire excessively hot), so cannot have touch — against Plato and the Platonists’ air daimons, immortal animals of air or fire, “like Ariel”; Thomas cites Apuleius on them.
• Aside: a student asks if he wants a mirror (something in his eye); “too much reading or the computer.”

8. Animal defined by sense; receiving form without matter (“not receptive of the species of the form without the matter”) #

The point: nothing is an animal without sense, and whatever cannot receive the form (species) without the matter cannot sense.

• Shower/ocean again: when the water’s warmth is received as the warmth of my own body I don’t perceive it; knowing is receiving the form of another as other — the red of that object, not as the color of my body.

9. Nature does nothing in vain: forward-moving animals need sense (“if nature does nothing in vain”) #

• Nature acts for an end (seen with the four causes); the same statement is Newton’s first rule of reasoning.
• Read: if every forward-moving body lacked sense, they would be destroyed and not reach the end that is nature’s work — how would it feed? The lion must see the giraffe; the sheep won’t come to the fox. Stationary animals need no distance senses since food comes to them.

10. Para. 388: no body has a discerning mind without sense; what judging is (“a soul and a discerning mind”) #

The point: sensing is before understanding, and judgment is rooted in the senses.

• Greek: nous kritikon — kritikon means judging, translatable “discerning.”
• Definition of judging: separating the true from the false (or good from bad) by some beginning in our knowledge. “You are sitting / you are not sitting”: separated by the senses. “No odd number is even / some odd number is even”: by the definitions of odd (not divisible into two equal parts) and even — beginnings of the science of numbers, not the very first beginning. Obtuse greater than acute: by the definitions.
• The very first beginning is the senses, hence “nonsense,” “that makes sense,” a “sensible man” = good judgment; in dreams we are deceived, cut off from the senses; Shakespeare: “Awake your senses, that you may the better judge”; to be out of your senses is to be out of your mind.
• Read: the ungenerable body — why would it not have sense, since sense is better either for soul or body, but here neither: the soul won’t understand more, nor the body be better. Thomas asks whether Aristotle means the heavenly bodies or the Platonists’ bodies (Ariel-like, immortal); left as “somewhat obscure.” Conclusion read: no non-stationary body has soul without sense; if it senses, its body is simple or mixed; not simple, for it would lack touch, which it must have.

11. Touch necessary for the animal’s very being; taste; medium (“animal without touch is not possible”) #

The point: touch senses the qualities that can destroy the animal; the other senses are for well-being.

• Excess of tangibles kills the man (furnace, cooler, being hit with something hard); excess of other sensibles only damages the organ: pungent smell/taste, sound too loud deafens, light propped-open eyes in the Spanish Civil War torture or mountain sun blinds — but doesn’t kill.
• Read: the animal is an insouled body (“animal” from anima; “animate matter”); every body is tangible; so the animal’s body must be tactile to be saved; the other senses sense through something different (exterior medium); without touch it could not flee or grasp — fall on the fireplace and burn.
• Taste is “like a certain touch”: food is a tangible body; sound, color, smell do not feed; food is the warm and dry, the wet and cool — sense qualities — bringing growth and diminution. Yet taste is a little more spiritual, more concerned with knowing: we speak of taste in wisdom, music, painting; wine tasting is sensible, a two-hour “feeling things” would be ridiculous. Thomas discusses at length “taste and see how sweet is the Lord” in the Psalms.
• The cat in St. Paul jumping on the stove: touch saved it, not smell (a student adds the hand on something hot).
• Read: the other senses are for well-being, in forward-moving animals: to be saved it must sense also from afar — the hunted animal sniffs you downwind; hunters disguise themselves; “the Indians were better at it.”
• Sensing from afar requires a medium that suffers (in the extended sense, is moved) by the sensible: the color moves the air, sound moves the air and then my ear. Order: unmoved mover, moved mover, the moved. Wax stamped moves only as far as it is dipped; a stone not at all; water further; air furthest and brings something about.
• Aristotle alludes to the Platonists’ view that something goes out from the eye; daily speech keeps it: “my eyes fell upon,” “the evil eye.”
• Aside: a biography of Solzhenitsyn — his arrest for remarks about Stalin, ten-year sentence, the naked examination under a huge portrait of Stalin; “man’s inhumanity to man.” Break before the thirteenth chapter.

His words #

• feeding soul / feeding powers: his English for the nutritive soul [ed.: vegetative/nutritive]
• before and after: what “order” means; senses: in time, in being, in the discourse of reason (knowledge), in goodness (his “second” and “fourth” senses)
• potestative whole: the soul as having all its powers, fullness in the understanding soul, parts below
• necessary: tied to before in being (can be without the other, not vice versa)
• most democratic mistake: Aristotle’s name (Sophistical Refutations) for mixing up senses of a word [ed.: fallacy of equivocation]
• end: that for the sake of which, not end of time
• simple body: earth, air, fire, water
• species: form, received without the matter (knowing = receiving the form of another as other)
• nous kritikon: discerning/judging mind
• judging: separating the true from the false by some beginning in our knowledge
• insouled body: his rendering of animated body (“animal” from anima)
• taste: “a certain touch,” yet a more spiritual sense
• suffering (of the medium): in the extended sense, being moved

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, De Anima III.12, with Thomas’s commentary paras. 386 and 388 (his numbers)

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Metaphysics, proemium to wisdom (other knowledges more necessary, none better)
• Aristotle, Sophistical Refutations (the “most democratic” mistake)
• Newton, first rule of reasoning (“nature does nothing in vain”)
• Shakespeare, The Tempest (Ariel); “Awake your senses, that you may the better judge” (play not stated)
• Thomas on the Psalms, “taste and see how sweet is the Lord”
• Apuleius (as quoted by Thomas, on air daimons)
• the Bible, plants appointed for us and the other animals (locus not stated)
• a biography of Solzhenitsyn

His questions #

• What sense of before and after is Aristotle bringing out in the order among these powers? Before in being: the feeding powers can be without sense, sense without understanding, touch without the distance senses — not vice versa.
• Which is better, the part or the whole? The whole; so sensing is better than feeding, understanding than sensing.
• Which is better, to breathe or to philosophize? Philosophizing; “breathing is more necessary” only shows before in the second sense.
• Which is worse, to have no words or no letters? No letters, because then no words; yet words remain better.
• Which is worse, to lose charity, hope, or faith? Faith, since losing faith loses hope and charity too.
• Which is better, plants or animals? Which loss would be worse? Animals are better (plants for their sake); losing plants is worse.
• What beginning do I separate “you are sitting” from “you are not sitting” by? The senses, the very first beginning of our knowledge.
• What is Aristotle referring to with the ungenerable body — heavenly bodies or the Platonists’ bodies? Left open (“somewhat obscure”).