Summa I, q.84 a.1: Does the Soul Know Bodies Through the Understanding? Heraclitus, Plato's Forms, and the Central Question of Philosophy

Orientation #

He opens on “the first article in the first question here on the knowledge of the things that are below the soul,” i.e. q. 84 a. 1, and closes proposing “a little break before we do the next article.” The previous class finished q. 83 on free judgment and previewed qq. 84–89; the next takes up q. 84 aa. 2–3. Verified sources also list a handout (“The First Statement and King of Statements”, p. 3) and a printed page (DHB Vol I, The First Philosophers, p. 103) as read in this episode; the transcript itself names neither, so the long digression on “the central question of philosophy” is probably where they belong (inferred). The sources’ 3-minute match on a. 2 is not reflected in the transcript, which ends before a. 2.

The class, in order #

1. The three objections and the sed contra (“It seems that the soul does not know bodies”) #

He reads the article’s opening: three objections against the understanding knowing bodies, and the counter-argument.

1. Augustine, Soliloquies II: bodies cannot be comprehended by the understanding, nothing bodily is seen except by the senses; and Genesis to the Letter XII: understandable vision is of things in the soul through its essence, which bodies are not. His aside: “you’ve always got to explain Augustine.”
2. As sense stands to understandable things, so understanding to sensible things; sense cannot know spiritual (= immaterial, understandable) things, so understanding cannot know bodies. His parallel to show the shape of the argument: as the eye cannot know sound, so the ear cannot know colour.
3. Understanding is of things necessary and always the same, the fully understandable; all bodies are movable; so understanding does not know bodies.

• Sed contra: reasoned-out knowledge (science) is in the understanding; if it did not know bodies there would be no science of bodies, and natural science, which is about movable bodies, would perish.

2. The first philosophers and the river of Heraclitus (“whatever is must be somewhere”) #

Thomas’s history begins: the first philosophers thought nothing exists but body, and, seeing bodies in continuous flux, concluded no certitude about truth is possible.

• He glosses “nothing but body” by Aristotle’s report in the fourth book of Natural Hearing [ed.: Physics] of the common Greek opinion: whatever is must be somewhere; to be somewhere is to be contained in a place, a property of natural body; so they identified what is with what is in place.
• What is in continuous flux cannot be grasped with certitude because it fails before the mind judges it to be such.
• Heraclitus (Metaphysics IV): you cannot touch twice the water of a flowing river; the water is other when you return. Our idiom “the situation is fluid” borrows the image: it changes as we describe it.
• Cratylus, student of Heraclitus and teacher of Plato: you cannot step even once into the same river, since as your foot breaks the surface the surface water is already other. His classroom version: he walks before the desks asking “where is Berquist?”; before he finishes saying “here” he is no longer here. Cratylus’s followers therefore held all you can do is point.
• This produced a “negative crisis” for Plato: how understand something that does not stand still (the word “understand” itself implies standing)? Aristotle says Plato in old age still held things learned from Cratylus; Plato’s dialogue Cratylus shows the opinion.

3. Plato’s separated forms (“another genus of beings, separated from matter and motion”) #

Plato found apparent understanding in two places and, to save it, posited unchanging things corresponding to it.

• The two places: mathematics (from the Pythagoreans) and Socrates’s definitions (knowing what a dog is and what a cat is, one understands no dog is a cat).
• So there must be unchanging things corresponding to mathematics and unchanging universals corresponding to definitions: a genus of beings apart from bodies, separated from matter and motion, which he called species or forms; by partaking of them each singular is called man, horse, etc. Hence science, definition and everything pertaining to understanding refer not to sensible bodies but to their separated forms; the soul does not understand bodies.
• Word note: the Latin species (in logic, the object of definition) translates the Greek eidos; “idea” is a bad English rendering, since in English an idea is a thought or image, not an objective form: say “Platonic forms.” Both species and eidos refer to the eye (cf. “spectacles”; Greek eidenai, to see): the form that is seen. English “form” loses the reference.
• Two routes to Plato’s position: (a) the “yes” answer to the central question (next segment): if the definition truly knows the universal form separated from singulars, what a man is must exist separated from all men; (b) in material things a thing does not seem to be what it is entirely: Socrates is an animal with reason, but is not identical with what a man is, else he would be the only man; so he is not a man through being Socrates; and “what is so not through itself must be so through another which is so through itself,” as coffee that is sweet not through being coffee is sweet through sugar, which is sweet through itself. Aristotle’s rejoinder, as he gives it: the form you posit has no matter, yet matter belongs to what man is. “It’s not like he had no reason to think this.”

4. The central question of philosophy (“Does truth require that the way we know be the way things are?”) #

A student asks him to repeat what Plato answered yes to; he sets out the question and Aristotle’s “no.”

• Philosophers talk about one of two things: the way we know (logic) or the way things are (natural philosophy, political philosophy, wisdom about all things). Their inner goal is truth. So the question that ties all three together is the central one: does truth require that the way we know be the way things are? Plato apparently answers yes, Aristotle no; most of the history of philosophy follows Plato, often without asking the question explicitly.
• Aristotle’s principle: if something is knowable in separation from another, there is no falsity in knowing it without the other; falsity comes only in the second act, if you say it is without the other.
  • Sugar white and sweet: the eye knows the white without the sweet, the tongue the sweet without the white; incomplete, not false.
  • Cube known apart from ice cube, wooden cube, plastic paperweight cube: the mathematician’s way.
  • What is common to you and me leaving aside individual differences; what is common to cat and dog (four-footed animal) leaving aside barking and meowing. Falsity would be to say there is a man neither white nor black; not to leave colour out of the definition of man.
• Second application: we can know things in a different order than they come. We know effect before cause (Sherlock Holmes: “we have to reason backwards”); the falsity would be to say the effect is before the cause in reality. He knows a student before the student’s parents; false only if he infers the student came before the parents. Aristotle: distinguish the order in things from the order in our knowledge.
• Water, hydrogen, proton: first in our knowledge is water; hydrogen was named from generating water; proton (Greek “first”) was last in our knowledge. What is first in knowledge is last in reality: “if anything” the two orders are exactly reverse.
• Spinoza says the order of thoughts and of things is exactly the same; Hegel takes it over, identifying the most confused notion in our mind, being in general, with the one who said “I am who am”; Thomas’s Summa Contra Gentiles (“my favorite book”) has a chapter showing they are not the same. “Terrible, terrible confusion,” anticipated by Descartes, explicit in Spinoza.
• Student: is that what got Anselm into trouble with his existential proof? Answer: a somewhat different problem, confusing the name with the thing.

5. Plato’s position false in two ways (“this appears false in two ways”) #

Back to the text: Thomas’s two refutations.

1. Since the forms are immaterial and immobile, you would exclude from the sciences the knowledge of matter and motion proper to natural science, and abolish demonstration through moving and material causes.
2. It seems laughable, to know things manifest to us, to bring in other beings in the middle which cannot be their substances since they differ in their very way of being; those separated substances once known, we could still not judge these sensible things, which are by nature material and mobile. Aristotle’s comparison as he gives it: like having trouble counting the people in this room and going to Yankee Stadium to count them along with everyone there: compounding the difficulty.

6. Why Plato deviated, and the reply (“the form is in one way in one sensible thing”) #

Thomas’s diagnosis of Plato and his answer from the sensible world itself.

• Plato held all knowledge is by likeness, so the form of the thing known must be in the knower in the way it is in the known; and since the form is in the understanding universally, immaterially and immobily (shown by its operation, which understands universally and with necessity), and the mode of action follows the mode of the agent’s form, the things understood must subsist immaterial and immobile. Student: that is answering yes to the central question. He agrees. “As if it was impossible to have an unchanging knowledge of change”: “a thing changing is becoming other” is always and necessarily true; we can have necessary truth about the non-necessary, “a timeless knowledge of time.”
• But this is not necessary: even among sensibles a form is in one thing intensely, in another remissly; here whiteness with sweetness, there without; and the sensible form is in the thing outside the soul one way and in the sense, which receives forms without matter, another: the colour of gold without the gold.
  • Your shape in his memory tonight vs. your shape in a statue by Michelangelo: the marble takes on your shape as its own; his eye does not, nor is any bone or flesh in his head chiselled into your shape. Shakespeare’s “my eye hath played the painter” is poetry, not a painting.
  • Yet he really knows shapes: his grandchildren’s box with round and triangular holes, where the child must match block to hole, shows the shapes are really there and really known.
  • One of the Greeks: look into someone’s eye and you see yourself in it; but that is the way a mirror receives a shape, not the way one knows by it. So even in the material world colour and shape are received in different ways.
• Likewise the understanding receives the species of material and mobile things immaterially and unchangingly, according to its own mode: “the received is in the receiver in the manner of the receiver.”
• Student: isn’t the teacher example (the same lesson received differently by different students’ minds, by capacity and prior knowledge) a different use of the principle? He answers: it is a very universal principle, “quidquid recipitur secundum modum recipientis” (a tongue twister from his youth), applicable to many things (a hard thing keeps a shape more stably than a soft one); Thomas applies it here to the mind’s receiving. He repeats the Latin word by word at a student’s request.
• What he draws from it: the mind knows changing, material things unchangingly and immaterially, not because of the thing known (which is material and changeable) but because it is itself immaterial and unchanging; “that really hints at the soul being immortal.” Knowing angels would be different, since there the thing itself is immaterial; the sign lies in knowing a material thing immaterially.

7. Immaterial, universal, necessary knowledge of bodies (“is a definition of stupidity stupid?”) #

Thomas’s conclusion: the soul by understanding knows bodies with immaterial, universal, necessary knowledge; he plays on the gap between the way of knowing and the thing.

• Is the definition of stupidity stupid? Who knows the student’s ignorance better, student or professor? The one who knows: one knows a lack of knowledge through the knowledge one has, and the student could not know his ignorance fully without knowing what he is ignorant of. The way of knowing differs from the thing, but we do not say ignorance is knowledge: it is an unbeing of knowledge in a subject capable of it.
• Unchanging knowledge of change: is a changing thing becoming other? Always; that never changes.
• Universal knowledge of the singular: “you’re a man,” “that is a cat.” We do not conclude he is universal because “man” is universal; that would attribute the way we know to the way he is.
• In God knowing and thing are identical: God knows all things by knowing himself, with no distinction between his knowledge and himself; some want us to have such knowledge, but we cannot.

8. Reply to Augustine (soliloquy) (“that by which the understanding knows”) #

Augustine’s words concern that by which the understanding knows, not that which it knows.

• The understanding knows bodies not through bodies nor bodily likenesses but through immaterial, understandable forms, which can be in the soul by their essence. He adds that this is “not altogether clear in Augustine,” but Augustine certainly does not want to deny we know bodies.
• Aside: “soliloquy” means speaking to oneself, like Hamlet alone on stage speaking his thoughts; he doubts “monologue” is the right word.

9. Reply to the second: lower and higher powers (“what a line is is not a line”) #

Sense and understanding are not symmetrical, because sight and hearing are particular powers while reason is universal.

• Reason can ask “what is colour? what is sound?” and much else. Augustine, City of God XXII: it must not be said that as sense knows only bodies, understanding knows only spiritual things (that would return to Plato’s difficulty, and assume the knower must be the same as the known); it would follow that God and the angels do not know bodies, which is absurd.
• The reason for the diversity: a lower power does not extend to what belongs to a higher, but the higher reaches what belongs to the lower, in a more excellent way.
• His illustration: imagination knows a line of some length, greater than, less than or equal to another; but what a line is is not a line, else it would be equal to, greater or less than this line and would not fit every line. Yet in understanding what a line is he understands what this and this and this is. The proper object of reason is the what-it-is of something sensed or imagined, as it knows in the triangle what a triangle is. Same for “lion”: what a lion is is not a lion (the transcript reads “lion” here; “line” is possible). “Very strange.” Plato touched a great truth: in material things what a thing is is not identical with the thing; in immaterial things it is. “This will come out, maybe, later on.”

10. Reply to the third: motion supposes something immobile (“nothing prevents one from having an unchanging knowledge”) #

Contingent facts are known only by sense, but changing things have unchanging relations.

• Granted: there is no intellectus of contingent things: that you are sitting there, not standing or lying down, he knows only by sense.
• All motion supposes something immobile: in change of quantity the substance remains; in change of substantial form the matter remains. And of changing things there are unchanging relations: Socrates does not always sit, but it is immobily true that whenever he sits he remains in one place. His own instance: in every change something becomes other; does that ever change? So unchanging knowledge of changing things is possible: “very subtle.”
• He proposes a break before the next article.

His words #

• understanding; his rendering of intellectus/intellect.
• reasoned-out knowledge; his rendering of scientia [ed.: science].
• Natural Hearing; [ed.: Physics].
• continuous flux, “flowing”; Thomas’s description of the first philosophers’ bodies.
• species / eidos / form; the Greek eidos, Latin species; “idea” rejected as a translation; both words refer to the eye (eidenai, spectacles).
• the central question of philosophy; “Does truth require that the way we know be the way things are?” Plato yes, Aristotle no.
• second act; where falsity enters, in saying a thing is without the other [ed.: judgment/composition].
• order in things vs. order in our knowledge; Aristotle’s distinction; he says they are “exactly reverse.”
• intense / remiss; a form more or less in a subject (white).
• quidquid recipitur secundum modum recipientis; whatever is received is received according to the way of the receiver.
• intellectus; he uses it for understanding, of which there is none of contingent things.
• unbeing of knowledge; his gloss on ignorance as a lack in a subject capable of knowing.
• soliloquy; speaking to oneself, speaking alone.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 84, a. 1 (objections, sed contra, body, three replies), verified.
• (Possibly) handout “The First Statement and King of Statements”, p. 3, and DHB Vol I, The First Philosophers, p. 103, per verified sources; not named in the transcript (inferred).

Mentioned

• Augustine, Soliloquies book 2; On Genesis to the Letter book 12; City of God book 22 (as cited in the article).
• Aristotle, Natural Hearing [Physics] book 4 (whatever is is somewhere); Metaphysics book 4 (Heraclitus’s river); Aristotle on Plato and Cratylus (locus not stated).
• Plato, Cratylus.
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, a chapter distinguishing being in general from God (locus not stated).
• Shakespeare, “my eye hath played the painter”; Hamlet’s soliloquy.
• Spinoza, Hegel, Descartes, Anselm (no works named); Sherlock Holmes.

His questions #

• Whatever is must be somewhere; if it isn’t somewhere, it doesn’t what? Exist; so the first philosophers held only bodies exist.
• Does truth require that the way we know be the way things are? Plato apparently answers yes, Aristotle no; the class follows Aristotle.
• Is the eye false in knowing the whiteness of sugar without the sweetness? No; incomplete, not false, since one is knowable without the other.
• Water, hydrogen, proton: which is first in our knowledge? Water; last in reality, so the two orders are reverse.
• Is your shape in my memory the way it would be in a statue? No; the marble takes it on as its own shape, my eye does not.
• Does our mind know material things immaterially because of the thing known? No, because it is itself immaterial and unchanging, a hint of immortality.
• Is a definition of stupidity stupid? Who knows the student’s ignorance better? The one who knows; a lack is known through the knowledge one has.
• Is what a line is a line? No, else it would be equal to or unequal to this line and not fit every line.
• In every change something becomes other; does that ever change? No; so unchanging knowledge of changing things is possible.