Article 7 Replies and Article 8: Reason and Understanding as One Power, Motion and Rest, Episteme and Natural Understanding

Orientation #

He opens mid-stream in the replies to q. 79 a. 7 (“the reply in the preceding article to the second objection” is referred back to) and, after a break, begins article 8. He does not name next time. He notes the naming rule “we’ve explained this before, I think, in logic, but it’s worthwhile saying again” (prev. lecture) is not resolved by the context block. The previous class treated a. 7 (memory as distinct intellectual power) and the next develops nature, reason and will from the proportion of understanding to reasoning.

The class, in order #

1. Reply to the second: past and present differentiate sense powers (“proper differences of the sensitive powers”) #

Point: past and present can be proper, diversifying differences of the sense powers, not of the intellectual powers, because the senses know the singular/particular and “the past” refers to that sort of thing (referring back to the body and to a. 6 ad 2).

2. Reply to the third: understanding arises from memory as act from habit (“as an act arises from a what habit”) #

Point: Augustine’s “one arises from another” need not mean the act of one power arising from the act of another power; the act of understanding can arise from its habit.

1. Something can arise from another in more than one way.
2. Sometimes the act of one power arises from the act of another power: loving wisdom arises from understanding what wisdom is; liking the girl arises from seeing the girl; hearing about rhetoric (Augustine’s and Thomas’s example) makes you want it; his own wanting to read de Tocqueville arose from hearing a Dominican praise him as careful “just like Aristotle”.
3. But “that ain’t the only way”: doing the Pythagorean theorem on the board proceeds from his habitual knowledge of Book I of Euclid; same power, act from habit. (He does it every final exam “so I don’t forget the proof.”)
4. So by memory Augustine can mean the soul’s habit of retention; by intelligence, the act of the intellect.

• Student: is memory then the storehouse of intelligible species in the passive intellect? Yes. Is “intelligence” the power? You could say: with the habit I can understand when I want; without Book I, I cannot understand the theorem whenever I want.
• Trinity image: Shakespeare’s definition of reason is habitual with him; from that habit proceeds actually thinking it again; thinking it as good, he loves it, “and magnetize my memory with its offspring.”
• Student objection: those making memory a separate power would end up saying that doing a learned theorem on the board is not using the understanding but another power. He agrees; that would make it like the senses, where recalling from the “treasure house” (Christ’s scribe bringing out new and old; the avaricious man taking out his jewels and locking them up; the photo album) is a different faculty from sensing, but in the mind, once drawn out, it is actual in the understanding.

3. Why sense powers divide receiving from retaining and the understanding does not (“because of the bodily nature of these things”) #

Point: in both sense and intellect one can receive and retain; in the senses receiving and retaining are not the same individual power, in the understanding they are.

1. Sense powers use bodily organs; what enables a material thing to receive well is not what enables it to retain well.
2. The understanding has no bodily organ, so the same power receives and retains—unless with Avicenna you deny retention of forms, which is against Aristotle (“the soul is the place of forms”) and against reason:
3. What is received is received according to the way of the receiver; the understanding receives immaterially, hence more permanently and stably than a body; if the mobile body retains forms, much more the understanding.

• A student’s question whether it is the sameness of object (the intelligible species) that keeps the power one is set aside: “that’s another question.”

4. Digression: the three looking sciences and why not a fourth (“there are three looking sciences”) #

Point: the sciences are distinguished by separation from matter and motion, and the division yields exactly three.

• Reason for separation from matter: the understanding is immaterial. From motion: the very word “understanding” is from standing, rest; the sciences are of necessary, unchangeable things.
• Natural philosophy: cannot leave motion out (nature defined by motion), but the definition of motion is motionless; the definition of time is not past, present or future; Aristotle in Book I of Natural Hearing has unchanging knowledge that change is between opposites.
• Mathematics: defines without sensible matter, so no reference to change; the geometrical sphere is neither heavy nor light (helium vs. lead balloon), neither bounces, shatters nor sticks (rubber, glass, steel ball), has no melting or freezing point.
• Thomas’s division: things depend or do not depend on matter for existence; are defined with or without (sensible) matter. Depend + defined with = natural philosophy; depend + defined without = mathematics (sphere, cube); do not depend + defined without = wisdom/philosophy, “metaphysics some people call it”.
• No fourth (not depending, defined with matter): nothing on the side of the thing nor of the immaterial mind gives reason to put matter in; “not a real possibility.”
• Parallel from the Poetics: a plot part is before something or not, after something or not; before-and-after is middle, before-not-after is beginning, after-not-before is end; a part neither before nor after has no connection to anything—absurd, so only three.
• Mathematics is “the odd animal”: depends on matter unless you are a Platonist, yet defined without it; Monsignor Dionne quoted (from Proclus, “I think”, in the Heath edition) that mathematics purificat oculum mentis; but logic purifies more, since in mathematics one still resolves to the imagination while logic treats what cannot be imagined, the universal.
• Logic begins with the universal (Albert the Great) or, as he says, with “names said of many things” (Porphyry’s Isagoge; even before it, univocal and equivocal); young Socrates in the Parmenides tries to imagine the universal as a sail and gets into trouble.
• Break. Aside afterwards: seeing God face to face is the end, but ordered to something further, loving him; the two are so close it is a kind of equivocation to ask which is the last end.

5. Article 8 opened: the names ratio and intellectus (“reason is another power from the understanding”) #

Point: intellectus (understanding, naming both act and power—Locke’s Essay on Human Understanding names the power) is divided into intellectus and ratio; one member keeps the common name, the other gets a new one. “What’s worth saying can be said twice.” Two ways a common name becomes equivocal by reason in this fashion:

• A. The one that has more fully what the name means keeps it: cat vs. kitten (kitten is a cat against a puppy, but the adult cat keeps “cat”); man vs. boy.
• B. The one that has something noteworthy in addition gets the new name: animal vs. man (the beast keeps “animal”, man has reason and will); disposition vs. habit (habit is a firm disposition); two vs. three (“natures of things are like numbers”: two keeps its name, two plus one is called three). Application: reason is an imperfect, intellectus adumbratus, “overshadowed understanding”, so it gets the new name; God’s or an angel’s understanding keeps “intellectus”. Yet sometimes we say we too have an intellectus, an overshadowed one, since we can hardly understand without discourse and images. Thomas approaches it from the acts: reason reasons, understanding understands.

6. The three objections and the sed contra (“understanding is compared to reason as eternity to time”) #

1. De spiritu et anima (attributed to Augustine, “doesn’t have much authority”): ascending from lower to higher, sense, imagination, reason, understanding; so reason differs from understanding as imagination from reason. His reply forecast: it names an order of acts.
2. Boethius, Consolation: understanding is to reason as eternity to time, “beautiful proportion”; not the same power is in eternity and in time. He adds Boethius’s easier proportion, reasoning to understanding as motion to rest, “I often use that.”
3. Man shares understanding with angels (“intellectual substances”), sense with brutes; reason, proper to man (rational animal), differs from sense, so also from understanding. Illustration: as with pleasures—the fine arts too high for animals, too low for angels—reason is too high for beasts (Moppet cannot be made to understand she is a beast and should complain less) and too low for angels, who understand without movement; “some truth to that.” Sed contra: Augustine, Genesis to the letter III: what makes man excel irrational animals is reason or mind or understanding (mind here for the power); so reason, mind and intellect are one power.

7. The body: to reason is to move, to understand is to rest (“to move is to what rest”) #

Point: reason and understanding in man cannot be diverse powers, manifest from their acts.

1. To understand is simply to grasp an understandable truth; to reason is to proceed from one thing understood to another to know an understandable truth.
2. Angels, perfectly possessing such knowledge by nature, apprehend truth without discourse or “running from one thing to another” (Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 7); men arrive at it by proceeding from one to another, hence “rational.” Shakespeare’s definition, the ability for large discourse “looking before and after”: looking is trying to understand, reached by discourse. Even natural understanding involves a kind of discourse, gathering memories and experience toward the universal, though not the discourse of universal reason as in geometry.
3. So to reason is to understand as to move is to rest, or to acquire is to have, imperfect to perfect.
4. Motion proceeds from the immobile and ends at rest: human reasoning in the way of inquiry/discovery proceeds from things simply understood, the first principles, and in the way of judgment returns by resolving to them—“a kind of a circle in our knowledge.” Aristotle teaches this in the Prior Analytics: generation of syllogisms, discovery of middles, then the “taking apart” reducing to principles, which names the whole book.
5. Rest and motion are not reduced to diverse powers but one, even in natural things: through the same nature a thing is moved to a place and rests there; much more will we understand and reason by the same power. “I can’t reason except through something I understand.”

• Aside on “thinking”: also names the movement of reason, but less clearly, since it also names opinion, a rest but not complete rest.

8. Handout: rest before and after motion; natural and reasoned-out understanding (“reasoned out understanding”) #

Point: from the proportion one learns that rest is before or after motion, giving two understandings.

• He stands at rest, walks, stops: rest after motion. When thinking succeeds, the mind halts: “reasoned-out understanding” or “thought-out understanding”; the Greeks’ one word is episteme, which Plato and Aristotle derive from the word for coming to a halt; Archimedes in the bath (“Eureka”) was no longer thinking. Latin scientia has no such etymology “at least I know of.”
• Is there an understanding before reasoning? If you understood nothing before, you would have nothing to reason from; so yes. Aristotle calls it simply nous, Thomas intellectus—the same name as the faculty, since it needs no discourse; he calls it “natural understanding.”
• Shakespeare defines reason as reason, not as a nature that naturally understands: the ability for discourse, what reason has in addition to what it naturally knows, “reason as an agent.” Recording ends here.

His words #

• proper differences; differences that diversify sense powers (past and present).
• habit / habitus; storehouse, treasure house, treasury of memories (the passive intellect’s retention).
• “whatever is received is received according to the way of the receiver.”
• looking sciences [ed.: speculative sciences]; sensible matter.
• Natural Hearing [ed.: Physics].
• wisdom or philosophy, “metaphysics some people call it.”
• purificat oculum mentis: mathematics purifies the eye of the mind.
• names said of many things: where logic begins.
• equivocal by reason: common name kept by one particular, new name for the other; two grounds (fuller possession; something noteworthy added).
• ratio / intellectus; intellectus adumbratus, “overshadowed understanding” (his rendering).
• reasoning is to understanding as motion to rest (Boethius); as acquiring to having.
• way of inquiry or discovery; way of judgment, resolving to first principles; “circle in our knowledge.”
• Analytics as the “taking apart” of syllogisms.
• thinking: movement of reason, but also opinion (incomplete rest).
• reasoned-out understanding, thought-out understanding: his rendering of episteme [ed.: usually "science"]; scientia.
• natural understanding: understanding before reasoning, nous, intellectus.
• “the ability for large discourse, looking before and after”: Shakespeare’s definition of reason, defining reason as reason, as agent.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 79, a. 7, ad 2 and ad 3.
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 79, a. 8: objections 1–3, sed contra, body (verified, ~20 min).
• Handout, “The Before and After in the Acts of (Looking) Reason”, p. 2 (verified, ~10 min).

Mentioned

• Thomas’s prologue division of the three sciences, “showing what Aristotle said” (locus not given; printed volume DHB Vol III, p. 949 is listed among verified sources).
• Aristotle, Natural Hearing (Physics) I: change between opposites.
• Aristotle, Poetics: beginning, middle, end.
• Aristotle, Prior Analytics: three parts.
• Aristotle, De anima: “the soul is the place of forms” (inferred locus).
• Avicenna on non-retention of intelligible forms.
• Euclid, Elements I, Pythagorean theorem.
• Proclus, quoted in the Heath edition (his “I think”).
• Albert the Great; Porphyry, Isagoge; Plato, Parmenides.
• Ps.-Augustine, De spiritu et anima; Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy; Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram III; Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 7.
• John Locke, Essay on Human Understanding (for the sense of “understanding”).
• Alexis de Tocqueville; Shakespeare’s definition of reason (Hamlet, inferred).
• Matthew’s scribe bringing out new and old (inferred).

His questions #

• Does “understanding arises from memory” mean one power arising from another? Not necessarily: an act can arise from a habit within one power, as the theorem from Book I of Euclid.
• Why is the same power that receives and retains in the understanding but not in the senses? Sense powers are bodily, and what makes a body receive well is not what makes it retain; the understanding has no organ.
• Why only three looking sciences and not four? A thing not depending on matter yet defined with matter is not a real possibility, neither the thing nor the mind giving reason for matter.
• What are the two ways a common name is kept by one particular and the other gets a new name? Fuller possession (cat/kitten, man/boy) and something noteworthy added (animal/man, disposition/habit, two/three).
• Why does reason get the new name and God’s or the angel’s understanding keep “intellectus”? Reason is an imperfect, overshadowed understanding needing discourse and images.
• Is it the same power that reasons and understands? Yes: to reason is to move from one thing understood to another, and rest and motion belong to one power, as one nature moves to a place and rests there.
• Is there an understanding before the movement of reason? Yes; otherwise there would be nothing to reason from—natural understanding, nous, intellectus.
• What is the understanding after the motion of reason called? Reasoned-out understanding, episteme, from the Greek for coming to a halt.
• Is Shakespeare defining reason as a nature that naturally understands? No, reason as reason, the ability for discourse—left as the closing point.