Summa I, Q.84 a.8 and Q.85 a.1: Judgment, Sleep and the Binding of the Senses; Understanding by Abstraction from Images

Orientation #

Before the prayer he says next time “will be the last one in this thing, and then the first one in the next,” and that they are back in school next week. He says a. 8 “ties in with Article Seven” (prev. lecture). The previous class treated q. 84 a. 7 on turning to phantasms; the next continues q. 85 a. 1 with the replies.

The class, in order #

1. Q. 84 a. 8, objections and sed contra (“whether the judgment of the understanding is not impeded”) #

He reads the article’s opening: is the judgment of the understanding impeded by the binding up of the senses?

• Obj. 1: the higher does not depend on the lower; the understanding’s judgment is above sense.
• Obj. 2: to syllogize is an act of understanding; in sleep, when the senses are bound, someone sometimes syllogizes (Aristotle, book on sleep and being awake). He stops to have the class define syllogism: an argument in which some statements are laid down and another follows necessarily because of those laid down.
• Sed contra: what happens in sleep against lawful morals is not imputed as sin (Augustine, Genesis to the letter, bk. 12); it would be if the sleeper had free use of reason.

2. The body: judgment goes back to the senses (“the proof of the pudding is”) #

Point: a perfect judgment about a thing needs knowledge of all that pertains to it, especially its term or end; for natural things that end is the senses.

1. The nature of a sensible thing is the object proportioned to our understanding (said above).
2. Judgment, in “looking reason,” is the separation of the true from the false; but one can add its beginning and its limit, and the beginning of our knowledge is the senses. Example: “is Berquist standing or not?” — we separate the true from the false by the senses; this holds especially in natural science.
3. Aristotle, third book about the universe: as the end of a making science is the work, so the end of natural science is what is seen chiefly according to the senses. Natural science begins in the senses and ends in the senses; Einstein said the same in the twentieth century.
4. The workman does not seek knowledge of the knife except for its work; the naturalist does not seek the nature of stone or horse except to know the reasons of what is seen by sense. No perfect judgment of the artist ignoring his work; none of natural science ignoring sensible things.
5. All we know in the present state is known in comparison to sensible things; therefore no perfect judgment when the senses, by which we know sensible things, are bound up. Dreams: deprived of the senses one is deceived, taking images for real things, then relieved or disappointed on waking. Examples for “the proof is in the work”: the proverb (“the proof of the pudding is in the eating”); a poet’s saying that one should never judge a work of art in its absence; a recipe kept if the dish tastes good, forgotten if not; a flying-machine plan judged by whether it gets off the ground and stays there, otherwise “back to the drawing board”; the engineer in his father’s company testing blueprints on the experimental farm; Detroit’s recalls after a fault shows up on the road. This is why modern experimental science can unite natural science with the mechanical arts: both are judged the same way, by going back to the senses.

3. Aside: where the other sciences go back to (“goes back immediately to the imagination”) #

Mathematics goes back immediately to the imagination. Example (recalling Mark’s point): Euclid’s fifth postulate is called a postulate about parallel lines, but parallel lines (lines extended forever never meeting) cannot be imagined; the actual postulate says that two straight lines making angles less than two right angles on one side will meet if extended — and two lines meeting can be imagined. Logic deals with the universal, which (as Albert the Great says) is the first thing considered in logic and cannot be sensed or imagined, so its judgment goes back to reason itself. Still, our knowledge as a whole starts in the senses, so ultimately judgment goes back to the senses.

4. Replies: the vapors of sleep (“certain fumes rising up”) #

Reply 1: though above sense, the understanding receives in some way from sense, and its primary and principal objects are founded in something sensible; his usual formula: reason’s own object is the what-it-is of something sensed or imagined. Reply 2, read closely: the senses are bound in sleep by evaporations, “fumositates resolutas” [ed.: fumositatibus resolutis], and the binding varies with them:

• many vapors: sense and imagination both bound, no phantasms (after much food and drink);
• weaker motion: phantasms appear but distorted and disordered (as in fevers);
• more sedate motion: ordered phantasms, most of all at the end of sleep (he notes dream studies now say the same), in sober men and those of strong imagination;
• moderate motion: imagination free and the common sense partly untied, so the sleeper sometimes judges what he sees to be dreams, discerning things from their likenesses; yet the common sense remains partly bound, so he is always deceived in something. Conclusion: to the extent sense and imagination are untied, judgment is liberated, but never totally; those who syllogize in sleep always recognize on waking that they failed in something. Aside: people go to bed with a problem and wake with the solution, so imagination and common sense are not wholly bound, especially for problems needing the imagination, and one is free of the day’s distractions. Student: is the vapor account just old medieval medicine? Answer: that belongs to the particular part of natural philosophy; the De Anima and the Summa here consider the soul in a kind of separation from the body, then Aristotle goes more and more into the body — natural science proceeds from general to particular, towards matter; the book on sleep already involves application to the body and belongs to what we now call experimental science. Student: waking with a problem clear worked in high school but not now — does it dull with age? Answer: he doesn’t know; children do more by imagination than we do.

5. Q. 85 prologue: the eight articles (“on the way and order of understanding”) #

He runs through the eight questions, glossing each:

• a. 1: whether we understand by separating forms from images.
• a. 2: whether the abstracted forms are what is understood or that by which we understand; Thomas will say the latter. Distinction: the form by which one thinks (separated from the images by the agent understanding, “like a light”) vs. the thought one forms in thinking.
• a. 3: whether we naturally understand the more universal first — the matter of Physics I, ch. 1 (“Natural Hearing”).
• a. 4: whether the understanding can understand many things at once, in second act (not just habitually: what a dog is and what a cat is together?). “We’ll find out.”
• a. 5: putting together and dividing, i.e. affirmative and negative statement.
• a. 6: whether the understanding can err (“err is human; to forgive is divine”).
• a. 7: whether one can understand the very same thing better than another.
• a. 8: whether it knows the indivisible before the divisible (De Anima III). Example: the point is defined as that which has no parts, as if what has parts is known first. “That’s very important”: we know God, who is altogether simple, through the composed by negating composition — in the question on God’s simplicity Thomas negates six kinds of composition in creatures, then in the seventh article says there is no composition in God, and in the eighth that God is not composed with anything else.

6. Q. 85 a. 1, the five objections (“there is no dog in general out there”) #

The article belongs to the section on how the soul understands material things, before how it understands itself and things above it.

• Obj. 1: to understand a thing otherwise than it is is false; forms of material things are not abstracted from the particulars the images represent; so abstraction brings falsity. Aside: Plato kept truth by positing a world of forms (man himself, dog himself); for Aristotle only this man, this dog exist. Examples: the dog Rosie — what is out there is Rosie, no dog in general; his roll call (“John, Thomas, Mary…”) — “man” has never replied.
• Obj. 2: material things are natural things, in whose definition falls matter (Aristotle’s argument against Plato: immaterial forms would give definitions of man, dog, horse without matter, contrary to their nature); nothing is understood without what is in its definition; but matter is the source of individuation; so they cannot be understood by abstracting universal from particular. On individuation: many identical window panes are possible because there is enough glass; many identical chairs because enough metal — matter as quantified, divisible, is the source of individuation. Student: could the form (a stamp) be another source? Answer: ask why there can be many cubes — because this cube is in this ice and that in that ice; it goes back to matter. Hence Thomas says no two angels of the same kind: they differ only formally, Gabriel, Raphael, Michael being different in what they are; likewise no two Sons in the Trinity, the Holy Spirit cannot be a son.
• Obj. 3: images are to the understanding soul as colors to sight (De Anima III); sight is not by abstracting colors but by colors being pressed upon it; so likewise the images are pressed upon the understanding.
• Obj. 4: two things in the understanding soul, the possible understanding (able to understand, must first be acted upon) and the agent understanding; abstracting does not belong to the possible, which receives forms already abstracted, nor to the agent, which is to images as light to colors and flows something into them rather than abstracting.
• Obj. 5: the understanding understands the forms in the images (De Anima III), not therefore by abstracting. He connects this with turning to the imagination: reason’s own object is the what-it-is of something sensed or imagined, so one must at least imagine the thing — as I cannot see the color of your clothes without your clothes, though the clothes are not my eye nor where seeing takes place.

7. Sed contra and the three parts of looking philosophy (“as things are separable from matter”) #

De Anima III: as things are separable from matter, so they pertain to the understanding. This is the basis for dividing looking philosophy into three: natural philosophy, about things depending on matter and motion both to exist and to be understood; mathematics, about things depending on matter and motion to exist but defined without them; wisdom, about things depending on neither and so not defined with them. A fourth member (not depending on matter to exist but defined with it) makes no sense. Mathematics is the odd case: cube is found in wood, ice, plastic, yet considered apart from all of them. Aside: reading Thomas on the Eucharist that morning — the quantity of the bread, preserved by God, is subject of the other accidents, and Thomas refers to mathematics separating quantity from substance; God can do more than our mind. Also arguable from the end of looking knowledge, to under-stand: to get something into reason, which is immaterial, it must be separated from motion, and matter and motion go together. Thomas explains this most fully on Boethius’s De Trinitate, qq. 5 and 6, Boethius repeating Aristotle.

8. The body: a threefold grade of knowing power (“has itself in a middle way”) #

The object is proportioned to the knowing power, and there are three grades:

1. Sense, the act of a bodily organ: its object is a form as existing in bodily matter; since matter individuates, sense knows only particulars.
2. Angelic understanding, neither the act of an organ nor joined to matter: its object is a form subsisting without matter; angels know material things only in immaterial things, in themselves or in God.
3. Human understanding, in the middle: not the act of an organ, yet a power of the soul that is the form of the body (soul defined as the first act of a natural body composed of tools). Its proper object is the form existing individually in bodily matter, but not as in such matter; to know it so is to abstract the form from the individual matter the phantasms represent. Conclusion: we understand material things by abstracting from images, and through them come to some knowledge of immaterial things — contrary to angels, who know material things through immaterial. Aside: Thomas always contrasts God’s knowledge (knowing other things by knowing himself) with philosophy, which knows God as cause from other things; theology, sharing God’s knowledge, begins with God, so its order is contrary to philosophy’s — hence Chisholm’s introduction to philosophy he read in high school, following the Summa Contra Gentiles, ran contrary to philosophy’s order. Plato, attending only to the immateriality of the understanding and not its union with a body, made its object separated forms, known by partaking rather than abstracting. He saw part of the truth (Anaxagoras was the first Greek to see the understanding as immaterial); for Aristotle only through the what-it-is of material things do we reach an imperfect, largely negative knowledge of immaterial things. A first problem of wisdom is whether there are immaterial things at all: the Greek philosophers shared the man-in-the-street opinion that whatever is must be somewhere, and being in a place is a property of bodies, so man is naturally a materialist and must reason to immaterial things from material ones; the first hint is in Anaxagoras’s great fragment. Break.

His words #

• judgment: separation of the true from the false; beginning and limit in the senses
• “looking reason” / “looking philosophy” [ed.: speculative]
• book about sleep and being awake [ed.: De Somno et Vigilia]
• third book about the universe [ed.: De Caelo III]
• “the proof of the pudding is in the work” (self-corrected to “eating”)
• reason’s own object: the what-it-is of something sensed or imagined
• “fumositates resolutas” — fumes rising up in sleep [ed.: fumositates resolutae]
• common sense — partly untied in moderate sleep, judging things from their likenesses
• Natural Hearing [ed.: Physics]
• second act — actually understanding, not habitually
• putting together and dividing — affirmative and negative statement
• possible understanding / agent understanding — the undergoing vs. the acting [ed.: possible / agent intellect]
• matter as subject to quantity — the source of individuation
• looking philosophy: natural, mathematical, wisdom [ed.: metaphysics]
• soul: first act of a natural body composed of tools [ed.: organic]
• “understand” — to stand, separated from motion

Texts #

Read in class

• Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 84, a. 8 (whole article, translated)
• Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 85, prologue and a. 1 (objections, sed contra, body; replies not reached)
• Handout “Note for Book One of Natural Hearing, Reading I”, p. 9 (verified source; the transcript shows only his reference to Physics I, ch. 1 at a. 3)

Mentioned

• Aristotle, De Anima III (images as colors to sight; possible and agent understanding; forms in images; separable from matter; indivisible before divisible)
• Aristotle, On Sleep and Waking; Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram XII; Aristotle, De Caelo III (inferred); Aristotle, Physics I, ch. 1
• Euclid, fifth postulate (inferred); Albert the Great on the universal in logic
• Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, on God’s simplicity (six, seventh, eighth articles; q. 3 inferred); Aquinas on the Eucharist (locus not stated); Super Boethium De Trinitate, qq. 5-6; Summa Contra Gentiles (order followed by Chisholm’s introduction)
• Anaxagoras, the great fragment
• Printed volume DHB Vol. III, The School of Aristotle, p. 316 (verified source)

His questions #

• Syllogism is a what? An argument in which some statements are laid down and another follows necessarily because of them.
• What’s the definition of judgment in looking reason? Separation of the true from the false, to which one can add its beginning and limit, the senses.
• Is Berquist standing or not standing now, and how do you know? Standing — by the senses.
• What’s the proverb about the pudding? The proof of the pudding is in the eating.
• Can you really imagine parallel lines? No — not lines extended forever; you can imagine two lines meeting.
• Is the vapor account just old medieval medicine? A question for the particular part of natural philosophy, i.e. experimental science; left open.
• Can the understanding understand what a dog is and what a cat is at the same time? “We’ll find out” — left open for a. 4.
• How can you have many window panes exactly the same? Because you have enough glass: matter under quantity individuates.
• What would another source of individuation be — the form or stamp? No; many cubes exist because of this ice and that ice; it goes back to matter, which is why no two angels are of one kind.
• Can there be a fourth member of looking philosophy, not depending on matter but defined with it? No, it makes no sense.