De Anima's Last Chapter: Why Touch Is Necessary, Then the Summa and Music's Power Over the Soul

Orientation #

He calls this “a brief look at the De anima” ending; next time the class moves to the Summa Theologiae, Prima Pars, questions 75 through 89, at least two articles per meeting, starting with q. 75 (seven articles; look at the first three). The previous class treated the order of the soul’s powers and touch as the fundamental sense; the next takes up music and Thomas on the Psalms.

The class, in order #

1. Opening aside on error (“how easily the mind is deceived”) #

On a sabbatical spent studying the causes of mistakes he came to feel like a psychiatrist friend of his brother Richard who saw everyone as “tottering on the edge of insanity”: once you see how easily the mind is deceived (his own students by equivocation), the human condition is a little frightening, and Socrates’ fear of mistake looks reasonable.

2. The animal body cannot be a simple element (“without touch, it can have no other sense”) #

Point: he reads the last chapter of De Anima II, Aristotle attacking the Platonist view that there could be animals made of fire or air (Shakespeare’s Ariel in The Tempest is an air-like creature; the poet may do this, but can such a thing be?).

1. Every ensouled thing is a tactile body; without touch no other sense is possible (said before).
2. The other elements (besides earth) can become sense organs, but those senses work “through something different,” through a medium; touch is “by touching,” whence its name; the other organs also sense by touch but through something else, touch alone through itself.
3. So an animal body of fire or air alone could not have the “middle ground” needed for touch.
4. Nor is the body earthy: touch is “the mean of all the tangibles,” receptive not only of earth’s differences but of hot and cold and the rest. Examples: we do not sense in bones (too hard) or hair and such parts (too earthy); plants have no sense because they are of earth; Lear holding dead Cordelia: “dead as earth.” Conclusion: the organ of touch is of no single element but a mixture, a mean between extremes. Asides: “fairly simple chemistry”: from Empedocles on, the Greeks took earth, air, fire, water as the fundamental matters. Earth is furthest from life (“dust thou art”); the soul, if an element, is fire or air; common man and poets picture it as air, sometimes fire (Othello with the candle: put out the candle and he can relight it, put out Desdemona’s life and no “Promethean” fire can rekindle it); no one thinks of the soul as earth.

3. Only loss of touch kills the animal (“only the sense organ, the sense power”) #

Point: deprived of this sense alone, animals die; an animal need have no other sense but this. Hence excess of the other sensibles (colour, sound, smell) destroys the organ, not the animal. Examples of organs burnt out: eyes held open to light go blind (that is why eyes blink), or eyes taped open as torture in the Spanish Civil War, yet one is not killed; loud music deafens kids; factory workers he and his brother Mark worked beside no longer hear the banging; women’s taste and smell said better than men’s, because men over-salt, over-pepper and burn out taste (wine-tasting too); his own hot Chinese lunch, four or five bites then nothing but burning; two men in an Indian-food contest, pores streaming; a friend who quit smoking rediscovered the taste of everything “like a kid.” Qualifications he reads: other sensibles may kill accidentally, as sound with a great impulse and blow, or corrupted air; a flavour kills insofar as it is at the same time tangible; excess of the tangibles, hot, cold, hard, kills the animal. Excess of the tangible destroys touch, and the animal is defined by touch, so it destroys the animal too.

4. The sign that reason is immaterial (“you can understand them what better”) #

Point: Aristotle used this fact (every excess of sensible kills the organ) as a sign of the difference between understanding and sense.

1. The senses are bodily, and bodies are affected by excess of object.
2. The understanding is not: think of something very understandable, God, then come down to the triangle, and you understand it better.
3. Therefore reason is immaterial, “not affected in the way a body would be affected by a very strong object.” Examples: pepperoni (“the sole pizza”) temporarily destroys taste, so no fine wine with pizza; even tomato-sauce spaghetti is too strong for Cabernet Sauvignon, you need a Chianti to balance it; a fortiori the hot Chinese or “three-star” Indian food. Against this, men like Charles De Koninck or Monsignor Dionne, from thinking about God, come down and judge literature better, not worse. Parallel he adds: love too, if you love God, the most lovable, you love your neighbour better, not less.

5. The other senses are for well-being (“not for the sake of being”) #

Point: the animal has the other senses not to be but to be well (though for animals that move place to place he said before they need these too). Sight because we are in the transparent; taste for the pleasant and painful, food, desire, movement; so taste is somewhat for the good life, a fortiori sight and hearing. Aside from Thomas in the Summa contra Gentiles: in the next life there are the sense pleasures compatible with that life, not eating or reproducing (we will be immortal), but seeing the beautiful world and the beautiful bodies of the saints, and laus vocalis, vocal praise, beautiful music for the ear; not the greatest pleasures of heaven, but in the higher senses.

6. What is to be said for touch (“the sense of certitude”) #

Point: from a De Koninck talk at Assumption (title garbled in recording; “…ergo sum”) on the importance of touch. Touch, compared with the eye, is:

• the sense of certitude: doubting Thomas trusts fingers in the wounds over sight; the fake metal ink-spill on his mother’s linen, you are deceived until your finger touches it; “the touchstone of certitude”;
• the sense of the interior: Thomas on the Psalms, “taste and see how sweet is the Lord,” taste as a kind of touch, knowing God inwardly rather than through eyes or ears;
• therefore the sense of nature and of the good (the first idea of good comes after touch); the moderns avoid good and nature because they tie up with eye and imagination, which are more mathematical;
• the sense of sympathy and pity: we are “touched” by misfortune; De Koninck on The Third Man, Orson Welles diluting medicines, Joseph Cotten in the closed Ferris-wheel car looking down at people as specks, the eye at a distance cuts you off; babies whose mothers died fail to develop even physically without being held and hugged by nurses.

7. Where the course goes next (“the gateway to eventually understanding the angels”) #

Point: this ends the De Anima (“we didn’t see everything”); next the Prima Pars, qq. 75-89. Thomas asks much Aristotle does not explicitly ask; the Summa was written for beginners, easier than the De Anima as it has come down to us. Thomas: I study the body to study the soul, the soul to study the angels, the angels to study God, “and I don’t say anything else.” The soul is central for ethics, moral theology, literature, rhetoric, logic; Aristotle: knowledge of the soul is desirable in itself and contributes to all our knowledge.

8. Sight and hearing, senses of the beautiful (“senses of the what? Beautiful”) #

Point: we say food is good, a smell is good, but Mozart or a sunset is beautiful: a sign that sight and hearing are more spiritual senses, touch and taste less, smell in between; the fine arts are tied to sight and hearing (sculpture in between). Hegel’s ordering of the fine arts, which “makes sense”: fiction (Homer, Shakespeare, Sophocles) above music, music above painting, painting above sculpture, sculpture above architecture. Colleagues who hold painting higher than music: “that’s ridiculous.” Student: does that mean hearing is higher than sight? No. Teaching the proemium to the Metaphysics he gave as sign of sight’s preeminence in knowing that we would rather be deaf than blind; an organist student said she’d rather be blind than deaf and argued music higher than painting, therefore ear higher than eye, a good argument against Hegel. But the eye is more like imagination and reason, sign: we carry “eye” over metaphorically: Hamlet’s “in my mind’s eye” for picturing his father (Horatio would not have believed the ghost “without the sensible vouch of my own eyes”); Gregory the Great in the Moralia, anger disturbs the eye of the soul, i.e. reason; and non-metaphorically “see” is carried to imagination and to understanding, and Aristotle used “light” of understanding. So the eye is the more spiritual sense.

9. Music, nature and moral education (“music is a very powerful thing”) #

Point: nature gives more beautiful sights (sunset, mountains, foliage) than our paintings, but we make more beautiful sounds (Mozart, Handel, Corelli) than the forest gives; music is like thinking, discursive, one thing leading to another. Aristotle in Politics VIII: music matters more than painting in moral education, its effect is far more powerful. Examples of bad music: the high-school dance song “I’m going to make a monkey out of you,” which is what the music itself did, making you apish, perverse in body, disposing the soul to vice; early rock-and-roll riots, his navy cousin’s sailors throwing folding chairs; parents at concerts smelling drugs; bands in the paper looking like monstrosities. Father Belay [ed.: name uncertain; also “Boulet”] compiled ancient texts on music and education (Aristotle, Politics VIII; the Republic). Student: does nature’s deficiency in sound tell us about nature? Maybe, but more about what music is: fiction’s original forms are musical, tragedy from “ode,” sonnet means song, lyric named from the lyre, Demodocus taking his instrument from the wall in the Odyssey; movies depend on their music; Greek plays were largely musical. Why: emotions are moved in harmony with music automatically; music representing emotion in a reasonable state moves them reasonably, disordered emotion disposes to moral vice. Student: is that why it is hard to explain the damage, because it bypasses reasoning? Yes; even at Thomas Aquinas College students from good families have bad taste in music, hard to change because music is so connatural; he acquired good taste through his brothers Mark and Richard. He has no copy of the compilation.

His words #

• “tactile body”: every ensouled thing; touch senses “by touching,” the others “through something different,” a medium.
• “mean of all the tangibles”: touch, hence its organ a mixture, not a single element.
• “the sole pizza”: pepperoni; excess of sensible destroys the organ.
• “well-being” vs. “being”: what the other senses are for.
• laus vocalis: vocal praise of God in the next life (Thomas).
• “touchstone of certitude”; touch as sense of certitude, interior, nature, good, sympathy, pity.
• “in my mind’s eye” (Hamlet): imagination; “eye of the soul” (Gregory): reason.
• “discursive”: music like thinking, one thing leads to another.

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, De Anima II, last chapter (animal body not simple nor earthy; touch alone necessary; excess of sensibles; other senses for well-being). Mentioned
• Shakespeare, The Tempest (Ariel); King Lear (“dead as earth”); Othello (candle, “Promethean” fire); Hamlet (ghost, “mind’s eye”).
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles (sense pleasures in the next life) (inferred locus not given).
• De Koninck, talk at Assumption on touch (title unclear in recording).
• Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Psalms (“taste and see”).
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, qq. 75-89, q. 75 aa. 1-3 (next classes).
• Aristotle, Metaphysics, proemium (sight’s preeminence); Politics VIII (music in education); Plato, Republic (music).
• Gregory the Great, Moralia (anger disturbs the eye of the soul).
• Hegel on the order of the fine arts (no locus).
• Homer, Odyssey (Demodocus).

His questions #

• Can there be an animal made of fire or air, as the poet’s Ariel? No: without touch no sense, and touch needs a mixed organ, a mean of tangibles.
• Why do we not sense in the bones or the hair? Too hard, too earthy; plants have no sense because they are of earth.
• Does excess of light or sound kill the animal? No, only the organ (blindness, deafness); excess of the tangible kills, since the animal is defined by touch.
• What does burning out the sense organs show about the understanding? That reason is immaterial: after understanding God, lesser things are understood better.
• What are the other senses for? Well-being, not being (though moving animals need them too).
• Why is touch nevertheless so important? It is the sense of certitude, the interior, nature, the good, sympathy.
• Does Hegel’s ranking of music above painting mean hearing is higher than sight? No; the eye is more like imagination and reason (“mind’s eye,” “eye of the soul”).
• Does nature giving worse sounds than music tell us about nature? Perhaps, but more about music: fiction itself has a musical origin.
• Why is music’s damage hard to explain? It moves the emotions in sympathy, bypassing reasoning; music is connatural.