Q.79 a.1, last replies, and a.2: Angels and mind, the first cause as the best thing, Socratic consistency, and understanding as a passive power

Orientation #

He picks up mid-article: “this reply to the second objection then” of a.1, and refers back to “the feeding powers that we talked about in the previous question”. He promises to bring back Aristotle’s proof against infinite regress “when we get to the other article if we have some time”. Verified sources: the class runs from a.1’s replies into a.2 in full; handout pages (“The Matter and Order of Wisdom”, “The First Definition of Reason”) are also in play. The previous class opened q.79 with a.1; the next takes up a.3 on the agent intellect.

The class, in order #

1. Reply 2 of a.1: the will “in the mind” and “in reason” (“the philosopher places the will in reason”) #

Point: Augustine’s placing the will in the mind and Aristotle’s placing it in reason say the same thing.

• One desiring power follows upon reason (choice), another upon the senses (emotions, feelings); we have both.
• Neither means the will is in the power called mind or reason; they mean it is in that part of the soul elevated above matter, unique to the rational soul, not shared with other animals.
• So the will, like active and passive understanding, is in the soul and not in the body — “in the higher part”.

2. Reply 3: why the angel is called a mind or an understanding (“the angel is called a mind”) #

• Angels have no senses and no emotions; only understanding and the will that follows upon it; hence “mind” or “understanding” names the angel because its whole power consists in this.
• This does not make the angel his own power of understanding: Latin often says “an understanding” for “a substance that understands”. The soul is not so apt to be called that because it has many other powers (sense, feeding).

3. Reply 4 and the word “understanding”; the angelic mind before the divine (“Anaxagoras has really arrived at an angel”) #

Point: immateriality is not the power to understand, but from its immateriality the substance has such a power; so understanding is the soul’s virtue or power, not its substance. The objections mostly come from not seeing how the word “understanding” is used.

• English “understanding” names both the act and the ability (“man has understanding”); Latin also used it, and “mens”, for the substance. Descartes’ two substances, extended substance and mind, do not really keep the distinction.
• Anaxagoras’ “greater mind”: a substance that understands, so can distinguish and order things. His question to students: is this the divine or the angelic mind? Angelic — it moves matter here or there but is not responsible for matter’s existence, which is what an angel can do.
• De Koninck once said in class (never followed up): it is easier by natural reason to know the existence of an angelic mind (a mind not mixed with matter) than of a divine mind that brings matter into existence from nothing but its own power. “You have to come in the way to the angelic mind before you come to the divine mind.”
• Marx and Engels’ false dichotomy: either matter is the beginning of everything, even mind, or mind is the beginning of everything, even matter. Third alternative: mind and matter independent, mind superior and acting on matter but not causing its existence — the position of Anaxagoras and of Plato’s Timaeus (the demiurgos ordering the chaos of matter). Leave out the intermediary and you get “a great gulf that no human mind could ever go”.

4. Chicken or egg: first cause and best thing must coincide (“the chicken came before the egg”) #

A student asks whether chicken/egg is the same mistake. No — a different question, answered by Aristotle in the ninth book of Wisdom by the distinction of simply vs. in some respect.

• Those who say the egg first, simply speaking, make the first of all things the most imperfect, first matter; those who say the chicken first make the perfect come before the imperfect, the first cause most perfect. Argument for the “schizophrenia” of the modern mind:

1. The end of our thinking is to know the first cause. Reason: the mind is not satisfied to know that, it wants why; causes have causes (“why did you hit me? — you were angry; why angry?”); this does not go on forever (Aristotle shows it), so the ultimate goal is the first cause. To understand is to know what stands under a thing.
2. The end of our thinking is to know the best thing. Reason: De Anima I gives two criteria of better knowledge, knowing a better thing or knowing it better; Parts of Animals makes the main criterion knowing a better thing (better to know a better thing a little than a lesser thing a lot). Sunset vs. garbage can, rose vs. things “we won’t even mention”, music vs. noise. So knowledge of the best thing is the best knowledge, and since the end is better than what is for the end, it is the end of all desire to know.
3. If first cause = best thing, everything fits together, as Aristotle says in the Ethics: “with the truth, everything fits together”. Ninth book of Wisdom: what goes from ability to act does so by something already in act (ability can’t give itself the act it lacks — a contradiction), so the first cause is pure act; and act is better than ability, ability is for act. So first cause and best thing are the same — “the sign that you found the truth”.
4. If matter/potency comes first (Lenin: “mind is the highest product of matter”; Feuerbach and Marx making the human mind the highest divinity), then the first cause is not the best thing: two last ends not the same — “permanent schizophrenia in the modern mind”.

• Student: where does Aristotle show there is no infinite regress? He declines to do it now: universally in the second book of Wisdom; for the end of human life in Nicomachean Ethics I; for the mover in Natural Hearing VII-VIII; for definitions and demonstrations in logic.
• Student: how do you know it is the best, not just better? Shown when we take up God’s goodness, as in the Summa Contra Gentiles, one step building on another: God is good; God is goodness itself; [unclear in recording — likely “everything good is from God”]; He is the good of every good; finally the highest good.

5. Socrates and thoughts that fit together (“philosophy is the highest kind of music”) #

Point: the sign of a mistake is that things you say don’t fit with other things you say.

• Length 10, width 4, area 30: at least one must be wrong. Usually one doesn’t contradict oneself directly; two admissions deduce something contradicting a third.
• Meno: the slave boy doubles the side to double the square. Side 2 → side 4; he admits 4 is double 2; areas 4 and 16; but 16 is four times 4, not double. What is more known to him (4 is double 2, 16 not double 4) stands, so the mistake is the rule of doubling the side.
• Phaedo: philosophy is the highest mousike; the philosopher aims at a harmony higher than sounds — the harmony of truth, thoughts fitting with each other and with reality; the practical philosopher, at the harmony of desire with reason. One truth doesn’t contradict another truth.
• Perry Mason cross-examination, the witness who breaks down: same method.
• Ayn Rand anecdote (Petrulko’s cousin and friend, “a man is morally obligated to do what he has freely agreed to do, but only that”): they accepted no obligations to parents or to God; accepted obligations from agreed tuition conditions or a $1,000 paint job; but would not accept that communists who agreed to overthrow the government are obligated to do so, nor that he’d be obligated to “rub you guys out” for a thousand dollars; also, you shouldn’t criticize someone for doing what you say he’s obliged to do.

6. Life, liberty, happiness (“give me liberty, give me death”) #

Student: is “live free or die” valid? Used to show that mere living is not the best thing (Patrick Henry, as he quotes him). In the Declaration, life, liberty, pursuit of happiness are in order of necessity — alive before free, free before pursuing happiness — while happiness is the ultimate end and best. So the pro-life claim that the right to life is the fundamental right is true: without life, nothing else. (Break.)

7. Article 2: the objections and sed contra (“the understanding is not a passive power”) #

1. Each thing suffers by its matter, acts by its form; understanding follows on immateriality; so not passive.
2. Understanding is incorruptible, but the intellectus passivus is corruptible (De Anima III).
3. The agent is nobler than the patient (Augustine, Genesis to the letter XII; Aristotle, De Anima III — “these two great minds say the same thing”); the vegetative powers, lowest, are all active; so the supreme powers must be active. “Interesting objection” — act is better than ability. Sed contra: the philosopher, De Anima III, to understand is a certain suffering, undergoing.

8. Three meanings of “to suffer” (“undergoing, or being acted upon”) #

Point: a Greek/Latin word carried to second and third meanings while the English stops at the first.

• “Power” (dunamis, potentia): English limits it to active power; so he translates “ability”, since “able” is carried over — breakable, beatable, burnable name an ability to be acted upon.
• pathos / passio: first meaning suffering (the Passion of Our Lord = His suffering): acted upon harmfully; carried over to being changed, not necessarily for the worse (clay cube reshaped to a sphere); finally to receiving anything, even what perfects you. He translates “undergoing” or “being acted upon” — “under the weather”, “he’s undergone a lot” keep the bad sense, but “undergoing” is less tied to the bad than “suffering”; a teacher, a fortiori God, acts upon you to improve you. Thomas’ three senses:
• (1) most properly: removed from what suits its nature or inclination — water losing coolness by heating, a man becoming sick or sad;
• (2) less properly: something taken away, suitable or not — the one healed as well as the one sick (an operation makes me better), the one who rejoices, anything altered or moved;
• (3) most broadly: in potency to something, receiving it without losing anything — everything going from ability to act, even when perfected. In this sense to understand is an undergoing; the objections take senses 1 and 2.
• Pearce’s Literary Converts: conversion is undergoing in sense 2 — one thing then the opposite, good or bad (to communism, from communism, sinner to saint). God acting on intellect and will: sense 3. De Anima also calls sensing an undergoing that perfects the one undergoing.

9. Why the first meaning is the one nearest the senses (“I see, said the blind man”) #

Student asks for the three senses again; he explains the order of meanings.

• The meaning the senses take note of tends to come first, because knowledge begins there. “Seeing”: act of the eye; then imagining (Hamlet: “I can see my father now… in my mind’s eye”); then understanding (his mother’s “I see, said the blind man”). The second meaning is nearer the first than the third: in a dream we take imagining for seeing, but never confuse seeing with understanding. King Lear as he tells it: a father betrayed by a son, eyes put out, now understands what he didn’t see with sight. Understanding is more important but seeing with eyes is named first.
• “Road in our knowledge”: his son (Mark or Paul) as a boy: “there are cars and trucks on it”.
• Being acted upon is more recognized when contrary to nature: a pin or knife in the ribs vs. my face acting on your eyes; a bright light, a deafening radio (kids going deaf in the ear nearer the sound). So sense 2 of undergoing is still more in the material order than sense 3.

10. Body of a.2: understanding and being in general (“like a blank tablet”) #

Argument that understanding is an undergoing:

1. Understanding has an operation about being in general — open to knowing everything in some way; so ask how each understanding stands to universal being.
2. Divine understanding is the act of all being: the divine essence in which the whole of being pre-exists originally and in power as in a first cause (God to Moses or Abraham, “I will show you every good” — Thomas: “I’ll show you myself”). So not in potency, pure act.
3. No created understanding is act of the whole of being, else it would be an infinite being; so every created understanding is compared to understandables as ability to act.
4. Two kinds of ability: always perfected by its act (like the ancient physics’ celestial matter, fully actualized by its form — “we don’t think that about them anymore”) vs. proceeding from ability to act (generable and corruptible things). The angelic understanding is always in act of its understandables, filled with every form it is in potency to, by nearness to the first intellect — like our mind after being formed by the arts and sciences.
5. The human understanding, lowest and most remote from the divine, is in ability to all understandables, at first a blank tablet (his blackboard at the start of class); manifestly we understand first only in potency, afterwards in act. Hamlet’s “since my dear soul was mistress of her choice… her election hath sealed thee for herself”: before, he didn’t know the difference among men. Conclusion: our understanding is an undergoing in the third way, so understanding is a passive power, acted upon by its object.

11. The replies (“the agent is more noble than the patient”) #

• Reply 1: the objection thinks of senses 1-2 (pin; clay sphere to cube); understanding is passive in sense 3, whatever is in ability reduced to act.
• Reply 2: intellectus passivus means either the sense desire, seat of the passions, “reasonable by participation” (Ethics I) because it obeys reason — Plato’s man and horses, emotions tamed to obey; or the virtus cogitativa, the particular reason, an interior sense (animals have the estimative instead). In both, passive in senses 1-2, being acts of a bodily organ. The understanding in potency to understandables, which Aristotle calls the possible intellect, is passive only in sense 3, having no organ — therefore incorruptible. Senses, having organs, undergo in all three: bright light blinds, loud sound deafens, strong peppers destroy taste.
• Reply 3 is different — not about the senses of “undergo”: agent nobler than patient with respect to the same thing (teacher over student’s mind, cook over the pie), not always with respect to diverse things. Understanding is passive with respect to the whole of universal being — De Anima III, the soul is in some way all things, receiving the natures of all things as definitions — whereas the vegetative powers are active only… [recording ends mid-reply].

His words #

• “understanding”: act, ability, or (Latin) the substance that understands; [ed.: intellectus]
• “mens” / mind: also used for the substance
• “greater mind” (Anaxagoras): a substance that understands
• “book of wisdom” (second, ninth): [ed.: Metaphysics II, IX]
• “Natural Hearing”: [ed.: Physics]
• “simply / in some respect”: the distinction that settles chicken vs. egg
• “ability”: his translation of dunamis / potentia [ed.: potency], since “able” covers being acted upon
• “suffering”, “undergoing”, “being acted upon”: his renderings of passio / pathos, undergoing preferred
• “intellectus passivus”: sense desire, or the virtus cogitativa / particular reason
• “possible” intellect: understanding in potency to understandables
• “reasonable by participation”: the sense desire insofar as it obeys reason
• “estimative power”: the animal counterpart of the cogitative

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 79, a. 1, replies 2-4
• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 79, a. 2, whole article
• Plato, Meno (the slave boy and the doubled square, retold) Mentioned
• Aristotle, De Anima I (two criteria of better knowledge); De Anima III (to understand is an undergoing; agent nobler than patient; soul in some way all things; sensing an undergoing)
• Aristotle, Parts of Animals (better to know a better thing)
• Aristotle, Metaphysics II (“second book of Wisdom”, no infinite regress), IX (ability and act; chicken and egg)
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I (end of human life; sense appetite rational by participation); Ethics (truth harmonizes)
• Aristotle, Physics VII-VIII (first mover)
• Augustine, On Genesis to the Letter XII
• Plato, Phaedo (philosophy the highest music); Timaeus (demiurgos)
• Thomas, Summa Contra Gentiles (order of proofs on God’s goodness)
• Shakespeare, Hamlet (mind’s eye; “mistress of her choice”); King Lear
• Joseph Pearce, Literary Converts
• Declaration of Independence; Patrick Henry (inferred); New Hampshire plate

His questions #

• Is Anaxagoras’ greater mind the divine mind or the angelic mind? The angelic: it moves matter but does not bring it into existence.
• Isn’t there a third alternative to Marx and Engels’ matter-first or mind-first? Yes: mind and matter independent, mind acting on matter without causing its existence.
• Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Depends on simply vs. in some respect; simply, the perfect precedes, else the first cause is the least perfect (ninth book of Wisdom).
• Why is the end of thinking to know the first cause? and to know the best thing? We seek the why, and causes of causes, to the first; better knowledge is of a better thing, so the best of the best.
• How do you know the first cause is the best, not just better? (student) Shown step by step when treating God’s goodness, as in the Contra Gentiles.
• How does Aristotle show causes don’t go on forever? (student) Deferred: Wisdom II universally, Ethics I, Physics VII-VIII, logic in particular.
• Is “live free or die” a valid statement? (student) It shows mere living isn’t the best; life, liberty, happiness are ordered by necessity, happiness the end.
• Why is “seeing” named first for the eye and last for understanding? The meaning nearest the senses comes first, because knowledge begins there.
• Isn’t the agent nobler than the patient, so the understanding should be active? Only with respect to the same thing, not diverse things; reply cut off.