Summa I, q.84 a.2–3: Does the Soul Know Through Its Own Essence or Through Innate Forms? Empedocles, Plato's Meno, and the Blank Tablet

Orientation #

He does not refer back to last time. He points forward: the creature’s limited nature means it “needs something to complete its knowledge; we’re going to see what that is in the third article,” and then in fact reads a. 3 in the same class. The previous class read q. 84 a. 1 (whether the intellect knows bodies), and the next reads a. 4 (whether intelligible forms flow in from separated substances).

The class, in order #

1. Article 2, the objections and sed contra (“the soul is in some way all things”) #

The question: does the soul know bodily things through its own essence or nature?

• Obj. 1 (Augustine, De Trinitate X): the soul forms in itself images of bodies, giving them something of its own substance; through likenesses of bodies we know bodies; so through its essence.
• Obj. 2 (Aristotle, De Anima III): the soul is in some way all things; like is known by like; so through itself.
• Obj. 3 (Dionysius): the soul is superior to bodily creatures, and lower things are in higher ones more eminently than in themselves; so bodies exist more nobly in the soul’s substance, and it can know them through it.
• Sed contra (Augustine, De Trinitate IX): the mind gathers knowledge of bodies through the senses of the body; the soul is not knowable through the senses; so it does not know bodies through its own substance. Aside: “there he sounds very Aristotelian, Augustine.”

2. The ancients: like is known by like (“by earth we know earth”) #

Point: everyone before Aristotle answered “yes” to what he calls the central question, thinking the form of the known is in the knower the same way it is in the thing.

• The Empedocles fragment (“by earth we know earth, by water water … by love love, by hate hate”): the soul composed of what it knows.
• Plato vs. the naturalists: Plato, seeing the understanding soul is immaterial and knows immaterially, made the forms of things subsist immaterially; the naturalists, taking known things to be bodily, made them exist materially in the soul, so gave the soul the nature of the principle of things (fire; air, Anaximenes; water, Thales; Empedocles’ four elements plus love and hate). Thus all knowing became material, with no distinction of understanding from sense “like Plato and Aristotle were.” He notes De Anima I brings this out clearly (he first says Physics I, then corrects himself).

3. Two disproofs of the naturalists (“the letters of the alphabet”) #

First disproof:

1. In a material principle, the things principled exist only in potency — if you knew the letters of the alphabet, would you know all words? “Only potential.”
2. Nothing is known as it is in potency but as in act (Metaphysics IX); potency itself is known only through act.
3. So giving the soul the nature of the principles is not enough unless it also had the forms of each effect — bone, flesh (De Anima I against Empedocles): flesh and bone are the elements in certain ratios, and Empedocles cannot explain knowing the ratios.

Second disproof, “even more powerful in some ways”:

1. If the known had to exist materially in the knower, there would be no reason why the thing subsisting materially outside the soul should lack knowledge — fire outside the soul would know fire.
2. His own version: to recognise you I must have your shape and colour in me somehow; but not as flesh or marble adapted to your shape, else “the statue over there” would know the person it has the shape of. Conclusion: the known is in the knower, but not materially — so immaterially.

4. Matter receives a form as its own; the knower as another’s (“Michelangelo … the marble would receive your shape”) #

Distinction: matter vs. knower. If Michelangelo carved you, the marble would lose its irregular shape and take yours as its own; the knower receives your shape as yours while keeping its own. Thomas’s reason: knowing extends to things outside the knower, but through matter a form is determined to some one thing; so the definition of knowing stands opposite to materiality. Consequences read from the text:

• what receives forms only materially does not know at all, e.g. plants (De Anima II);
• the more immaterially something has the form, the more perfectly it knows: understanding, which separates the form from matter and from individuating material conditions, knows more perfectly than sense, which receives without matter but with material conditions (hence the singular); among senses sight is most knowing because least material; among intellects, the more immaterial the more perfect.
• So an understanding that knows all things through its nature must have all things immaterially in its nature — which is proper to God alone, whose essence comprehends all things as effects are in the power of their cause. Neither the human soul nor even the angel understands everything through its own nature.

5. Replies of article 2 (“blank tablet on which nothing is written”) #

• Ad 1: Augustine speaks of imaginary vision; the soul gives something of its substance to the images as a subject to be informed, as a body is called coloured because informed by colour — “what’s received is received according to the receiver.” Augustine keeps the part that judges these images (mind, intellect) distinct from the part informed by them (imagination, common to us and the beasts). He remarks Thomas “really has to stretch there” to bring Augustine in line, Augustine being a less careful writer.
• Ad 2: Aristotle’s “all things” means in ability, not in act: sense in potency to sensibles, understanding to understandables — the blank tablet. When you get the definitions of things, then you have their natures in your mind.
• Ad 3: each creature has limited, determined being; a superior creature has some likeness of the lower insofar as they share a genus, but is determined to its species, outside which lies the lower species. God’s essence alone is the perfect likeness of all things, as universal source. Aside: pantheists imagine God composed of everything and cannot see how God contains all things simply; “we’re not to worry about God right now.”

6. Article 3, objections and the tools of dialectic (“the tool of difference before the tool of likeness”) #

Question: does the soul understand all things through species naturally innate?

• Obj. 1: Gregory (homily on the Ascension) says man understands in common with the angels; angels understand through innate forms; “every intelligence is full of forms” (Liber de causis). His comment: here is likeness as the cause of deception — the likeness (both understand) without the difference (angels through created-in forms, we through forms acquired through the senses).
• Digression on Topics I, the four tools of dialectic: (1) selection of probable premises, (2) distinguishing the senses of a word, (3) finding differences, (4) consideration of likeness. Years ago he put to Monsignor Dionne that Aristotle gives difference before likeness, though in defining you begin with the genus (the likeness) and add differences — as if to remind you that likeness without difference is apatē [ed.: deception]. Aristotle’s word for the fourth tool is skepsis [ed.: rendered from “skeptic”], a “digestive consideration,” since in an analogous likeness you must see in what way A is to B as X is to Y; any one difference lets you conclude at once that two things are not the same, but from a likeness you must be careful how you proceed.
• Obj. 2: the understanding soul is nobler than first matter; first matter is created under forms it is in potency to; so much more the soul under intelligible forms. His anticipation: Thomas himself compares our intellect to prime matter (understandable only in potency, as prime matter is being only in potency), but the objection assimilates them where they differ — the understanding is a power of the soul, which is a substance; prime matter is substance in ability and cannot be at all without a form.
• Obj. 3, from the Meno: only one who knows can answer the truth; the slave boy, with no acquired science, answers truly when questioned in order; so knowledge before acquisition, hence innate species.
• Sed contra: De Anima III, the understanding is like a tablet with nothing written on it.

7. Respondeo: form, action, and Plato’s impediment (“if it’s impeded from going upwards”) #

1. Form is the principle of action; as a thing stands to the form, so it stands to the action — the old physics’ example: what is only in potency to being carried upward is light only in potency; what is in act carried upward is light in act (his parallel: in chemistry a precipitate, once it has weight, goes down).
2. We see man is sometimes knowing only in potency, in sense and in understanding, and is brought to act: sensing by the action of sensibles, understanding by learning from another (disciplina) or by discovery (inventio) — “two ways of coming to know.”
3. So the knowing soul is in potency to the likenesses that begin sensing and those that begin understanding; hence Aristotle: no innate species, but in the beginning potency to all of them, actualised through sensation, memory and experience. Objection (Plato): one with a form in act may be impeded from acting, like the light thing held down; so the mind is naturally full of intelligible forms but impeded by union with the body — “quite a shock, you’re stuck in the body” — and recalls them by effort. His illustration: knowing someone’s name at a party but unable to bring it out until you work at it; you did know it. Thomas’s two replies: (a) if the soul naturally knew all things, so great a forgetfulness that it does not know it has science is not possible — no one forgets what he naturally knows, e.g. that the whole is greater than the part; and it is especially unfitting if the soul is naturally joined to the body, since a natural operation cannot be totally impeded by what is natural to the thing. (b) When a sense fails, knowledge of its objects fails: a blind man can in no way know colours as such — impossible if the definitions of all understandables were innate.

8. Digression: the sin of the angels (“may my beatitude glorify you”) #

Prompted by a student’s “angels can’t forget.” He was reading today (Summa Contra Gentiles; he also says “question one ten”) on the fall of the angels: their original sin was pride, not referring their own excellence back to God’s glory (retulit, “bring back”). It is natural to want one’s own beatitude; referring it to God is not natural but must be chosen — so one should ask “may my beatitude glorify you.” Hatred of God (as opposing their will) and envy of man followed from it, not as original sins (“by the envy of the devil death came into this world,” Wisdom). Thomas holds it probable the devil was the highest angel: unless very excellent he would not have been tempted to rest in his own excellence. Aside: Teresa of Avila appearing to one of her sisters — “we’re not so different,” you praise God behind the veil, we face to face.

9. Replies 1 and 2: angels, celestial matter, and the scale of act (“our mind is like the first matter”) #

• Ad 1: man shares understanding with the angels but falls short of their eminence, as inferior bodies fall short of superior ones: the matter of inferior bodies is not wholly completed by form and remains in potency to others; the matter of the celestial bodies (thought incorruptible) is wholly completed and so incorruptible. He flags the likeness is good though the illustration is “something we don’t think is the case.” The angel’s intellect is perfected by intelligible species by nature; ours is in potency to them.
• The comparison he puts on the board: in the order of being, God pure act, first matter pure ability, everything between (you and I: actually a man, a geometer, but many things in ability, not even thinking of what we know all the time) a mixture; likewise in the order of the understandable, God pure act, our mind lowest, “pure ability,” angels between, some more in act than others.
• Ad 2: first matter has substantial being through form, so must be created under some form, and under one is in potency to others; our understanding does not have its substantial being through an intelligible form — the form is joined to it that it may understand, not that it may be. So not similar. Thomas uses the likeness elsewhere but “you have to see at the same time the difference.”
• Likeness without difference as “the universal cause of deception”: the good resembles the bad and the bad the good, “fair is foul when foul is fair, hover through the fog and filthy air” — the fog being confused, indistinct knowledge. Student: Thomas often says deception comes from not seeing a distinction; he agrees it amounts to the same, distinction being the broadest word, even broader than difference: not seeing that the one is not the other — us and angels, us and prime matter.

10. Reply 3: ordered questioning and the slave boy (“he’s seeing it for the first time”) #

• Ad 3: an ordered interrogation proceeds from common principles known per se to proper ones, and through such a process knowledge is caused in the learner; when he answers truly about what he is asked second, he learns it de novo. It makes no difference whether the teacher proposes or questions — in both the hearer is made certain of what comes after through what comes before.
• Common vs. proper principles, his geometry example: axioms (whole greater than part), known to all men, vs. private principles of geometry (“all right angles are equal”), known by those with a little learning. But is the latter seen the way the former is? Definition of right angle: a straight line meeting a straight line making equal angles. To see that right angles at one point equal those at another you lay one line on the other; if they do not coincide, one falls to the side; labelling the angles (A, B, C, D, X), given the equal angles at one point, the whole is greater than the part, giving one angle much greater than another which must be equal — a contradiction. So the proper principle is seen through contradiction and through the axiom.
• The Meno: asked for the side of a square twice as big, the boy says double the side; that gives four times, so now he knows he does not know. Socrates then builds four squares, takes the diagonals; the diagonal square is four halves, i.e. twice the original — each step small enough to answer. So double-by-the-diagonal is not actually among what he already knew; he could know it from what went before. Table example (student answers “in ability”): knowing length and width and how to multiply, you know the area in ability, not actually until you multiply. The boy has the statements but has never put them together; when he does, he knows for the first time, not recalling.
• Plato’s/Socrates’/Meno’s mistake: thinking that what comes out of something must have been actually in it, not seeing “in ability.” If short of chairs you can get them from the next room — or from the trees on campus, though it takes longer; something in the tree is able to be a chair.

His words #

• the central question: whether like is known by like in the ancients’ sense, everyone before Aristotle answering “yes”
• in ability / and ability: [ed.: in potency] — his standing rendering of potentia
• understanding: [ed.: intellect]
• the understandable: [ed.: the intelligible]
• like is known by like: the ancients’ common principle
• receives the form of another as its own vs. as another’s: matter vs. knower
• imaginary vision: Augustine’s term, through images of bodies (Ad 1, a. 2)
• blank tablet: the mind at the beginning (De Anima III)
• disciplina / inventio: learning from another / discovery, the two ways of coming to know
• axioms: the common principles known per se; “private principles”: the proper principles of a science
• apatē: deception (as in the Topics)
• skepsis: his gloss on Aristotle’s word for the consideration of likeness, a “digestive consideration”
• retulit: to refer / bring back one’s excellence to God
• de novo: newly, what the questioned learner learns
• distinction: broadest word, broader than difference

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 84, a. 2 (whole article, translated)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 84, a. 3 (whole article, translated)

Mentioned

• Augustine, De Trinitate X and IX (cited in a. 2)
• Aristotle, De Anima III (“the soul is in some way all things”; the tablet); De Anima I (against Empedocles); De Anima II (plants)
• Dionysius (lower things in the higher more eminently)
• Empedocles, fragment “by earth we know earth …”
• Aristotle, Metaphysics IX (nothing known as in potency)
• Gregory the Great, homily on the Ascension
• Liber de causis (“every intelligence is full of forms”)
• Aristotle, Topics I, the four tools
• Plato, Meno (the slave boy)
• Thomas, Summa Contra Gentiles on the sin of the angels; “question one ten” (locus as he gives it)
• Book of Wisdom (“by the envy of the devil …”)
• Shakespeare, Macbeth, “fair is foul” (inferred)

His questions #

• “If you knew the letters of the alphabet, would you know all words?” Only potentially — letters are other words only in potency.
• “Why wouldn’t the statue over there know the person that it has the shape of?” Because the shape is in it materially; the known is in the knower immaterially.
• Aristotle said the soul is in some way all things — in what? In ability, not in act.
• Angels, do they forget? (student’s remark) No, they don’t — which leads into the sin of the angels.
• “What were the first three tools?” (student) Selection of probable opinions; distinguishing the senses of a word; finding differences (the fourth: likeness).
• Do you see that all right angles are equal in the way you see the whole is more than a part? Not directly: through superposition and contradiction, using the axiom.
• If we know the length and width of this table but have never multiplied, do we know the area? In ability — not actually until you multiply.
• Is the slave boy recalling or seeing for the first time? Seeing for the first time; Socrates mistakes being in something in ability for being actually in it.