The Agent Intellect, the Father of Lights, and Memory in the Understanding (Avicenna, Habitual Knowledge, History vs. Poetry)

Orientation #

The recording opens mid-anecdote about Father Boulay, continued from the end of the previous class (prev. lecture), then picks up at the reply to the first objection of a.5. He mentions “the inward senses” as studied “earlier” and the axiom “what is received is received according to the mode of the receiver” as “talked about before”. The previous class worked through a.5 (agent intellect not one in all men); the next continues with the replies of a.6 on memory.

The class, in order #

1. Boulay anecdote; reply to the first objection (“misunderstands in what way the agent intellect”) #

Point: the first objection of a.5 misreads the sense in which the agent intellect is “separate”.

• Anecdote: Father Boulay, asked whether Bach is on the level of Mozart, replied “Mozart, substance separate” — i.e. angelic, a compliment (and a joke at Berquist’s expense earlier, “the angelic doctor”).
• Aside on names: in theology we call the separate substances “angels” because Scripture shows them in their role as messengers, though Scripture also calls them ministers, looking back toward God.
• Reply to obj. 1 is simply that it misunderstands the way the agent intellect is said to be separated; “people constantly misunderstand things.”

2. Reply to the second objection: one in relation to the many images (“something one in comparison to the many images”) #

Point: the agent intellect (“acting upon understanding”, his translation) causes the universal by abstraction from matter, and for this it must be one in relation to the many things it abstracts from, in so far as it is immaterial — not one in number in all men.

• Aristotle’s order of learning: sensing; memory (what is sensed “makes a stop” inside instead of going in one ear and out the other); many memories of the same sort gathered into experience; then the agent intellect separates out what they have in common, and that is the beginning of understanding for the possible intellect.
• Aristotle’s military image, drawn from Homer: troops retreating, one man turns and makes a stand, others rally to him — the first image stops, similar ones stop beside it. He found a matching scene in one of Shakespeare’s history plays. Student: to get the soldier to stop, do you have to stop and think? — “in a sense, it’s like that.”
• Conclusion: to make one out of many the agent intellect must itself be one — “it’s one power that I have” — but that does not make your agent intellect and mine one individual power.
• Student objection: don’t you already need a common idea to recognise that images are of the same sort? Answer: not yet distinct; there is already an influence of reason in the gathering (the particular reason), but the common thing has not been separated out distinctly. Plato’s dialogues show this: asked what something is, people give examples, not a definition; a little boy asked what a nose is points — “there’s a nose, there’s a nose.” Hence Aristotle sees experience as more human than bestial: beasts sense and remember, but experience is a bringing-together.
• Asides: read a series of Thomas’s arguments slowly, letting each “calm down in your head” before the next, as one memorizes a sonnet a few lines at a time, restarting from the beginning; photographic memories (Boswell’s boy Johnson; a high-school classmate who remembered every girl’s name; Roosevelt’s manager with prompt cards); Johnson’s “anything written hastily is generally not worth reading”; Johnson on a man who doesn’t think about what he eats and drinks.

3. Reply to the third objection: the first understandables and the Father of Lights (“shows the unity also of a separate intellect”) #

Point: all men agree in the first understandables because they agree in the power that is the principle of that action — the same in kind, not in number.

1. Things of one species agree in the action following on the nature of the species, and so in the power which is its principle — same in kind, not number.
2. Knowing the first understandables is an action following on the human species (natural according to our common nature).
3. So all men agree in the power that begins this action, the agent intellect — same in kind, not necessarily in number; hence it must be derived from one principle.

• The agreement of men in the first things understood shows the unity of a separate intellect, which Plato compares to the sun — not the unity of the agent intellect, which Aristotle compares to light.
• The two Scripture texts “we are working with”: John 1, the Word as the light that enlightens every man coming into this world (one light behind all); and “every perfect gift is from above, from the Father of Lights” (James 1:17, inferred) — each of us is given the light of reason, a power of our own soul, the power to make universal and understandable what is in the image. So Thomas does not deny the element of truth in a single source, “maybe the divine substance itself”; from that one source each receives a share, and that share is the agent intellect.
• Student: the prayer that angels strengthen the lights of our minds? — Yes; the angelic light, far greater than ours, also comes down from the Father of Lights, and an angel need only will it. Aside on the Pope’s Mysteries of Light and the Eucharist.
• The devils work through the imagination, a great source of error: Thomas often gives false imagination as the first cause of error on the side of the knowing powers (pride on the side of the will). Imagining a thing other than it is happens even with imaginable things, a fortiori when one tries to imagine what cannot be imagined.

4. Digression: universal vs class, and resolving to imagination (“the universal is something one said of many”) #

Point: the moderns, unable to understand the universal, substitute the class, because a multitude is more imaginable.

• Universal vs class: the universal is one said of many; the class is a collection of many. Boundary cases: “man” vs “mankind” — I am a man, I am not a mankind; “we are church” — I am a Catholic, a Christian, a member or part of the church, but not “a church”.
• Two meanings of genos prior to the logical one (Aristotle; Porphyry’s Isagoge): a multitude descended from one man, and the one man from whom the multitude descends (himself and his grandchildren: “you are responsible for all this”). Neither is the logical meaning, but each has a likeness: the genus is one (not as an individual), and it extends to many — as said of them, not as a collection.
• Modern logicians resolve to imagination (circles etc.) and get into problems — different from using a diagram merely as a help. Plato’s Parmenides: young Socrates imagines the universal as a sail over all, but then only part covers each; whereas the whole of “man” is said of each of us, not “rational” of me and “animal” of you.
• Locke on the general idea of triangle (equilateral, isosceles, scalene; right, obtuse, acute): “all and none of these” — because he tries to imagine triangle in general, and any imagined triangle is an individual one; like Anaxagoras’s matter. Berkeley concludes there are no general ideas at all — the same failure.

5. Digression: angels, place, and picturing things wrongly (“whatever it is must be somewhere”) #

Point: imagination makes us treat being-in-a-place as a property of being, and so misunderstand angels, the soul and God.

• De Potentia q. 4 (Genesis and creation): were the angels created before the material world? Some Fathers (Basil, Gregory Nazianzen) say yes; Augustine says together. Thomas will not call the Fathers’ view erroneous but finds Augustine’s rationabilior and gives the reason. A further article asks whether God could have created them before; an objector says no, since two angels cannot be in the same place — thinking of angels as bodies.
• Aristotle, Natural Hearing IV [ed.: Physics], on place, quotes the Greek common opinion: whatever is must be somewhere, else it does not exist. Root: we do not think without images, and images are always extended.
• Even imaginable things are imagined wrongly: C. S. Lewis’s uncle (“what right did you have to think that?”); picturing places and persons never seen; imagining college, graduate school, teaching; the photograph of the Baghdad crowd — “what right did you have to assume they were rational?”
• Objection reported and left as an example of the error: angels would not be distinct unless one were here and another there.

6. Article 6: whether memory is in the understanding part — the objections (“memory is common to men and beasts”) #

Point: the objections and sed contra are read, with his glosses.

• Obj. 1 (Augustine, De Trinitate XII, “whose profundity is singled out”): the superior part of the soul has what is not common to men and beasts; beasts sense bodily things and commit them to memory; so memory is not in the intellect. His gloss: if memory is in the intellect, it will not be memory in the same sense as that common to him and the cat — the cat runs upstairs and round the corner to her dish, and rejoiced returning to her old places after boarding (aside on retrieving a biting cat from a cage).
• Obj. 2: memory is of the past; the past is according to a determined time; so memory knows something as here and now — the singular, which belongs to sense, not intellect.
• Obj. 3: memory conserves species not actually thought of; but the intellect is in act by being informed by the species, and for the intellect to be in act is to understand in act, so it understands whatever it has the forms of. He notes this goes back to Avicenna: forms are in the mind only while we think of them, so we are “constantly being emptied” and must turn to the separate agent intellect.
• Sed contra: Augustine, De Trinitate X — memory, understanding and will are one mind; “mind” names the intellectual part; Augustine sees there the image of the Trinity.

7. Body: Avicenna’s position, and Thomas’s method (“repugnant to the words of Aristotle”) #

Point: since it belongs to memory to conserve species not grasped in act, one must first ask whether understandable species can be conserved in the intellect; Avicenna said no.

• Avicenna, “an eminent philosopher among the Mohammedans” whom Thomas quotes with respect and often disagrees with: in the sense part, powers that are acts of bodily organs can preserve species not actually grasped (sense memory as “treasure”); the intellect has no organ, so nothing is in it except in an understandable way, hence whatever has its likeness there is understood in act. When one stops thinking, the species ceases; to understand again one must turn to the agent intellect, a separate substance, from which forms flow in; practice leaves a disposition to turn to it, which he calls the habit of science. Aristotle and Thomas: the habit of science is the understandable forms preserved in the mind, a certain ordering of them.
• Thomas’s procedure: first the position is repugnant to Aristotle’s words (this paragraph), then to reason (the next).
• Digression on belief before understanding (Augustine: believe in order to understand): reading Euclid he believes the proposition will be demonstrated, but the end is to know; modern science rests on more belief than philosophy does. Hesiod’s threefold division (quoted in Ethics I, taken over by Thomas, found also in Basil and Machiavelli): the man who discovers by himself, the man who learns from another, the one who can do neither — “a useless wight”, Thomas charitably: “useless as far as acquisition of knowledge is concerned”. His names: the wits, the dimwits, the nitwits; “know thyself”; a dimwit who thinks he is a wit is a serious problem; the dimwit must know he is one and whom to believe.
• Balance: Thomas’s commendation [ed.: inaugural lecture] on Scripture, where the student is compared to the earth: lowly (humble, submits to the master), stable (discretion about what to believe — he need not believe Aristotle on the moon and sun, since telescopes have been invented; Aristotle himself complained of his distance from the stars as against cutting open animals), fruitful (draws consequences, applies what he learned).

8. Aristotle’s text: habitual knowledge and first act (“able to operate when it wants to”) #

Point: De Anima III says the possible intellect, having become each thing as one knowing, is in act and can operate by itself, yet is still in potency, though otherwise than before learning or discovering.

• The possible intellect becomes each thing by receiving its form, and thereby can operate when it wants — he could go to the board now and demonstrate geometry, having learned it — but is not always operating; it is in potency otherwise than before it picked up Euclid.
• Aristotle uses this to manifest the soul as first act: habitual knowledge is first act, actually thinking with it is second act. He notes Aristotle’s “learning” and “finding” match the dimwit and the wit.

9. The reason: received according to the mode of the receiver (“more stable and immobile than any body”) #

Point: Avicenna’s view is also repugnant to reason.

1. What is received in something is received according to the mode of the receiver (the same lecture heard by all, taken back differently by each; the frustrated first-year professor who brought in a student to re-explain, and was blamed for it; his own perfect exams; a book or film received variously; the parable of the seed on stones and good ground, thirty-, sixty-, a hundredfold; fire melting, hardening, softening).
2. The intellect is by nature more stable and immobile than any bodily matter, not being a body — “that’s why we use the word understanding”: a thing becomes understood when it stands still; the definition of time is timeless; we understand changing things in an unchanging way.
3. Bodily matter retains forms even after it ceases to act through them (sense retains what it is not sensing). Conclusion: much more does the intellect retain understandable forms in an immobile, unlosable way — whether taken from the senses or flowing in from a superior intellect (said partly because of Avicenna, partly perhaps because God or a higher intellect may act on us).

10. The distinction: conserving species vs the past as past (“the past as past is something singular”) #

Point: memory taken as a power conserving species is in the intellect; memory whose object is the past as past is in the sense part only.

• The past as past signifies being under a determined individual time, hence the condition of the particular: he remembers driving up a short time ago, or this morning’s class on eternity, by sense memory. Boethius: a thing is singular when sensed, universal when understood.
• History is knowledge of the singular; Aristotle in the Poetics says poetry is more philosophic than history, since philosophy is of the universal and great fiction is in between but nearer the universal: Romeo and Juliet shows how young lovers are, not one pair in 14th-century Verona (“universal singularized or singular universalized”); Shakespeare’s plays show the whole of human life; the chorus after Oedipus’s fall addresses “generations of men”. Pure historians see only differences in every comparison (Dave Fair at Assumption: “the purpose of history is to show the fallacy of all historical comparisons”); yet MacArthur at Inchon did “what Wolfe did at Quebec” (landing where no one expected), and Machiavelli’s History of Florence has a like case — abstracting something universal. Aristotle studied 150 city-states before Politics V (revolution and conservation): history as a source of experience and foresight for political philosophy, though the two Gulf Wars differed and the dire predictions did not materialize.
• The possible intellect understands the universal directly: “I can’t understand any one of you” — whatever I understand of you (philosopher, grandfather, half Swedish, half Irish, bearded, sitting there) could be found in another; to reach your singularity I go back to my senses.
• Student: how then does God know each particular one of us? — God and the angels do not know by abstraction; God makes the singular, so his understanding knows singular and universal alike; for us it is divided, reason for the universal, sense for the singular.
• Closing remark, citing “Austin’s” essay on the evaluation of music [unclear in recording]: fine arts and fiction are more pleasingly proportioned to man, joining something singular for sense and imagination with something universal for reason; Shakespeare is easy to read beside “this stuff” because the mind is not bored and the imagination is taken up by his images.

His words #

• substance separate; Boulay’s joke for the angelic; the separate substances called “angels” from their role as messengers, also “ministers”
• acting upon understanding; his translation of intellectus agens [ed.: agent intellect]; possible understanding = possible intellect
• experience; the gathering of many memories of the same sort, more human than bestial
• particular reason; the influence of reason already at work in gathering images
• first things understandable; the axioms, statements known to themselves by all men
• Father of Lights; source from which each receives the light of reason, a power of the soul
• false imagination; imagining a thing other than it is; first cause of error on the knowing side
• universal vs class; one said of many vs a collection of many
• genos; two pre-logical meanings of genus (multitude descended from one; the one from whom they descend)
• Natural Hearing [ed.: Physics]
• rationabilior; more reasonable (Augustine’s view in De Potentia)
• treasure; Avicenna’s word for sense memory
• habit of science; for Avicenna a disposition to turn to the agent intellect; for Aristotle and Thomas the ordered understandable forms preserved in the mind
• wits, dimwits, nitwits; his names for Hesiod’s three kinds of men; “useless wight”
• first act / second act; habitual knowledge vs actual consideration
• received according to the mode of the receiver
• understanding; what stands still becomes understood; “the definition of time is timeless”
• past as past; being under a determined individual time, condition of the singular
• universal singularized / singular universalized; how great fiction stands between philosophy and history

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 79, a. 5, replies to objections 1–3
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 79, a. 6, objections, sed contra, and body (through the distinction on the past as past)
• Aristotle, De Anima III, on the possible intellect becoming each thing (as quoted by Thomas)

Mentioned

• Augustine, De Trinitate XII and X (in the objections and sed contra)
• John 1 (the light that enlightens every man); “every perfect gift… Father of Lights” (James 1:17, inferred)
• Thomas Aquinas, De Potentia, q. 4 (angels and the creation of the material world)
• Aristotle, Physics IV, on place; Nicomachean Ethics I (Hesiod’s division); Poetics (poetry more philosophic than history); Politics V
• Porphyry, Isagoge (meanings of genus)
• Plato, Parmenides (the sail)
• Locke, Essay concerning Human Understanding (idea of triangle); Berkeley on general ideas
• Thomas’s commendation of Sacred Scripture (student like the earth)
• Boethius (singular when sensed, universal when understood)
• Boswell’s Life of Johnson; C. S. Lewis; Shakespeare’s history plays, Romeo and Juliet; Sophocles’ Oedipus; Machiavelli, History of Florence; an essay by “Austin” on the evaluation of music [unclear in recording]

His questions #

• To separate out something one from many images, must the agent intellect be one and the same individual power in all men? No — one power in each, one in relation to the many images, not one in number.
• Doesn’t gathering images already require a common idea? Reason is already at work (particular reason), but the common thing is not yet distinctly separated out.
• What does the agreement of all men in the first understandables show the unity of? A separate intellect (Plato’s sun), not the agent intellect (Aristotle’s light).
• What is the difference between a class and a universal? Universal is one said of many; class is a collection of many (man vs mankind).
• Can you imagine triangle in general? No — any imagined triangle is an individual one; Locke’s “all and none”.
• Are you a wit, a dimwit or a nitwit? Know thyself; the dimwit must know he is one and whom to believe.
• Whose fault is it when the same lecture is understood by one and not another? What is received is received according to the mode of the receiver.
• Why is poetry more philosophic than history? It approaches the universal; history is knowledge of the singular.
• Can I understand any one of you? Not in your singularity — whatever is understood could be found in another; the singular is reached by sense.
• How does God know each particular one of us? Not by abstraction; he makes the singular, so his understanding knows singular and universal alike.