Aquinas, Summa I q.85 a.5-6: The Mind's Statements and Identity, and Whether the Understanding Can Be False

Orientation #

He opens mid-question: “let’s look at the replies now to the objections here” of the article on composition and division (a. 5), then says “we can do one more article of these today” and reads a. 6; the recording cuts off as he begins a further point. Verified sources place the class in Summa Theologiae I, q. 85, aa. 5–7 (a. 7 only for the last two minutes). He mentions in passing that “we were talking in the beginning about purgatory” (before the recording). The previous class treated aa. 4–5 (many things at once; composition and division), and the next takes up aa. 7–8.

The class, in order #

1. Replies to objections 1 and 2 of a. 5 (“the understanding joins time to”) #

Point: a statement knows many things, but as one, and it is time-bound only through the images.

• Reply 1: composition and division come about “by a certain comparison or difference”; the mind knows many things by composing and dividing “just as it knows the difference of things, or the comparison of things” — they have “been made one in some way”.
• Reply 2: the understanding abstracts from images yet does not understand in act “except by turning itself to the images”; from that side it “joins time” to composition and division, because images are continuous and with time.
• Application: this is why “we have a hard time speaking about God”. We say “God knew before I did it”, but strictly time cannot be applied to God’s eternal knowledge. Christ says “before Abraham was, I am” — not “I was” — “touching upon his eternity”. In the vision of God there will be “no before and after… it’ll be all at once”.

2. Reply 3: composition in the thing and composition in the mind (“a sign of the identity”) #

Point: the mind’s composition corresponds to something in the thing, but does not hold itself the same way in the thing as in the mind.

1. The likeness of the thing is received “in the way of the understanding itself, and not in the way of the thing” — already in the first act, what is sensed as singular is understood as universal.
2. The understanding’s own object is “the what it is of a material thing”, which falls under sense and imagination (he notes he has said this before).
3. Twofold composition in the material thing:
   • form to matter — to this corresponds the composition by which “the universal whole is said of its own part”: genus taken from common matter, the species-completing difference more from form, the individual from individual matter;
   • accident to subject — to this corresponds predicating accident of subject: “Man is white”.
4. The difference: things composed in the thing are diverse, but the composition of the understanding “is a sign of the identity” of what is composed.

• “I am healthy”: I and my health are not the same thing, but the statement’s form is a kind of identity, though “me and healthy are not as much the same as I am I”.
• Socrates is Socrates (Boethius: nothing more true): Socrates appears twice, “but only in the mind”; there is one Socrates out there. “A dollar is a dollar is a dollar… I get four dollars. I am getting rich. It’s only in my mind that I multiply the dollars.”
• So the mind does not say “man is whiteness” (not the same thing) but “man is white”, i.e. “having whiteness”; likewise “Berquist is healthy”, not “Berquist is health”. What is a man and what is having whiteness are the same in subject.
• Same for form and matter: animal signifies what has a nature such that it senses, rational what has a nature that understands; man has both, Socrates all of these with his individual matter. “According to this notion of identity” the mind says one thing of another — “kind of unusual thing that our mind does”.
• Return to God: “whatever God has, He is really”, yet we have two ways of speaking — “God is good” or “God is goodness itself” — which “goes back to our way of understanding, taken from material things”.

3. Article 6, objections and sed contra (“understanding is always right”) #

Point: can the understanding be false? He reads the three objections and the two authorities against.

• Obj. 1: Aristotle, Metaphysics VI — true and false are in the mind; mind and understanding are the same; so falsity is in the understanding. He remarks it is “kind of strange” Thomas argues this side against Aristotle, “the most humble student of Aristotle”.
• Obj. 2: opinion and reasoning belong to the understanding, and falsity is found in both.
• Obj. 3: there is peccatum in the understanding part, and sin is with falsity, “for they are mistaken who do evil” (Proverbs): whoever does what is bad, “his reason has to be saying it’s good in some way”.
  • Aside on peccatum: in Latin and Greek it covers any defect of operation, not only moral sin — a baby born without an arm is a peccatum naturae, “sin of nature”; the cook overcooking the meat, adding numbers wrong. (Student: a chair missing a leg? — no, it is the artist’s defect.) “For us, the word sin is much more narrow.”
• Sed contra: Augustine, Eighty-Three Questions — everyone who is mistaken “in that which he fails does not understand”; Aristotle, De Anima — “understanding is always right” (referring to “the natural understanding of the mind”, he glosses).

4. Body, first half: the senses as the model (“deceived about a common sensible”) #

Point: Aristotle (De Anima III) compares understanding to sense; sense is not deceived about its own object, but about common and accidental sensibles.

• Private object: sight is not deceived about colour, except per accidens through a diseased organ — the sick man’s tongue judges sweet things bitter; his mother’s rule “the orange before the candy”, else the orange tastes bitter.
• Common sensibles: deceived about size or shape — judging the sun “foot length” when it is greater than the Earth. Optical illusions: two lines of equal length; add the arrow-strokes and one “looks shorter” — “you’re being deceived about a common sensible… you’re not being deceived as to the color of these lines”. “This is Aristotle’s point.”
• Sensible per accidens: “even more deceived” — judging bile to be honey from likeness of colour; salt in the sugar bowl, since one does not sense sweetness as such but “just sees the color”.
• The reason: “each power per se as such is ordered to its private object” (eye to colour, ear to sound), and such things “always have themselves in the same way”; so, the power remaining, its judgment does not fail about its own object.

5. Body, second half: carried over to the understanding (“the understanding is not deceived”) #

Point: the analogy gives what the intellect cannot and can be wrong about.

1. The understanding’s own object is the what-it-is; about this “as such” it is not deceived.
2. About “those things which stand around the nature”, it can be deceived — “when it orders one to another”, composing, dividing, or reasoning. He compares: this is like the senses “knowing one thing through another” — I know shape by how far the colour extends, or by how the hardness gives off to my hand; not strictly reasoning, “it’s at the same time”, but “like that a little bit”.
3. Hence it cannot err about statements known as soon as their terms are known — first principles known to all: “the whole is more than a part”. To some extent also the private principles of a science: knowing odd and even, you see no odd number is even; knowing obtuse (greater than a right angle) and acute (less), and that all right angles are equal, “obviously an obtuse angle is greater than an acute angle”.
4. From this comes “the infallibility of truth” for conclusions: syllogizing necessarily from statements you were sure of makes you sure of the conclusion.
5. Per accidens the understanding can be deceived about the what-it-is “in composed things” — not from an organ (it uses none) but from composition intervening in the definition: the definition of one thing false about another (circle defined of triangle), or a definition false in itself joining impossibles (“rational animal… winged”). In simple things, where no composition intervenes, we cannot be deceived but “fail… in wholly not attaining at all” (Metaphysics IX). He flags: Thomas “is admitting in some way there can be even a mistake in understanding what a thing is”, insofar as you must put things together and may do so wrongly; but in simple apprehension there is no error.

• Replies: (1) Aristotle places falsity in the mind “according to its putting together or dividing”; (2) likewise for opinion and reasoning; (3) the sinner’s error “consists in the application of something to the desirable”. In the absolute consideration of what a thing is, and of what is known through it, the understanding is never deceived — so speak the authorities.

6. A sophistical argument: the mind is never mistaken (“a dog is a cat”) #

Point: he offers an argument to the class (“see what you do with it”) and lets it stand largely as an objection, not a refutation.

1. If the mind is mistaken in saying A is B, it is because A is not B and it does not see the difference.
2. But to form “A is B” one must first understand what A is and what B is.
3. “A dog is a cat”: if all you understand of dog and of cat is “four-footed animal”, then you are saying a four-footed animal is a four-footed animal — true. If you understand any difference (barks / yowls), you see they differ and cannot say it.
4. So either you do not understand dog and cat at all (and cannot make the statement), or you understand only what they have in common, and what you understand is true.

• Student: so the speaker is true in his mind but “as it is expressed, it’s false” — “it’s in the words”. He agrees, and recalls theological propositions the Church has condemned “at least in the way it’s expressed”: correct understanding, false expression — “correct his tongue”.
• He grants it is an objection to the mind’s being false, and remarks it “has a lot to do with likeness being a cause”.
• Wine: the inexperienced drinker says all wines taste the same — Cabernet yesterday, Pinot today. Is he mistaken? “All he tastes is a dry red wine… his knowledge is not that distinct”, so he is saying a dry red wine is a dry red wine. Beer story: the professor praising Heineken, whose bottle is refilled with a cheaper beer while he is out — mistaken, “not a beer connoisseur”; “it depends on how many he’s had”.
• Student asks about the position that you cannot know what a dog or cat is, only the term arbitrarily applied. His answer: I may not know the essential nature, yet I would say a dog is a four-footed animal that barks, a cat one that meows. Socrates would ask: is it a cat because it meows, or does it meow because it is a cat? — the latter; so I am defining by a property rather than the species-making difference. We do this because the property is more sensible and the difference hidden; such an imperfect definition he calls “encircling” rather than a definition in the full sense. But one can investigate the difference from the property.
  • Aristotle in the Ethics first calls virtue a praiseworthy quality (a property), then asks who is praised: not the stingy man nor the extravagant — Jefferson always buying and in debt, unlike Adams (from a John Adams biography he was given) — but the man in the mean who spends what is right for him and the circumstances (25th anniversary at McDonald’s is fine only if that is all you can afford; hundred-dollar wines wreck the budget). So the golden mean is “more essential to virtue”, “getting more inside the thing”.
  • Wisdom named as “the best knowledge”: knowledge of a better thing is better; the best thing is the universe (whole better than part), or its maker if it has one; so one reasons to wisdom as knowledge of the first cause, God — from a comparison with other knowledge to a more intrinsic idea.
  • Property vs difference: a property follows upon the nature — being half of four follows upon two, “not what makes two to be two”.
• Return: something is wrong with the sophism, but it shows “a failure in a way to understand dog and cat when you say a dog is a cat”. His students know no odd number is even because they understand enough of odd and even to see one cannot be the other; “no triangle is a circle” is easier to know than “no dog is a cat”, because we understand triangle and circle better than dog and cat. He begins “a fortiori, if you say no angel is God…” and the recording ends.

His words #

• “putting together and dividing”: composition and division; affirmative or negative statement.
• “turning itself to the images”: the mind’s dependence on phantasms [ed.: conversio ad phantasmata].
• “the what it is of a material thing”: the understanding’s own object [ed.: quiddity].
• “universal whole said of its own part”: predicating genus/species of what falls under them.
• “sign of the identity”: what the mind’s composition signifies, though things composed are diverse.
• “having whiteness”, “having health”: his gloss of “white”, “healthy” as predicates.
• peccatum: Latin for sin, but covering any defect of operation; peccatum naturae, “sin of nature”.
• “private object” vs “common object”: proper sensible (colour, sound) vs common sensible (size, shape); “sensible per accidens” (the third).
• “the infallibility of truth”, “the unfailingness of truth”: certitude of science about conclusions.
• “species-making difference”: what constitutes the species [ed.: specific difference]; vs “property”, what follows upon the nature.
• “encircling”: imperfect definition by genus and property [ed.: descriptive definition].

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 85, a. 5, replies to objections 1–3
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 85, a. 6, entire (objections, sed contra, body, replies)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 85, a. 7 — opening only, per verified sources (2 min; recording cut off)

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Metaphysics VI (true and false in the mind) and IX (failing in simple things)
• Aristotle, De Anima III (understanding compared to sense; understanding always right)
• Augustine, Eighty-Three Questions
• Proverbs, “they are mistaken who do evil”
• Boethius, on “Socrates is Socrates”
• John 8, “before Abraham was, I am” (inferred)
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, on virtue as praiseworthy and the mean
• Verified handout: “Note for Book One of Natural Hearing, Reading I”, p. 9; printed volume DHB Vol. III, p. 316 — matched by the verification system, not named in the transcript

His questions #

• Aren’t you understanding many things when you make a statement? Yes, but as one, through comparison or difference.
• Why can’t we apply time to God’s knowledge? It is eternal; “before Abraham was, I am” — no before and after in the vision of God.
• How is composition in the mind an assimilation to things when the things composed are diverse? It corresponds to composition in the thing (form–matter, accident–subject) but is a sign of identity: man is white, not whiteness.
• What does Aristotle mean by sin (peccatum)? Any defect of operation — a baby born without an arm, overcooked meat, a wrong sum.
• About what is the eye deceived? Not colour, its private object, but size and shape (common sensibles) and the sensible per accidens (bile taken for honey).
• Why is the understanding not deceived about first principles? They are known as soon as the terms are known — the whole is more than a part; no odd number is even.
• Can the understanding be deceived about what a thing is? Per accidens, in composed things, through composition in the definition; in simple things it only fails to attain.
• Can a man really think a dog is a cat? If he sees no difference he understands only what they have in common, and “a four-footed animal is a four-footed animal” is true — left open as a sophism with “something wrong with it”.
• Is it a cat because it meows, or does it meow because it is a cat? It meows because it is a cat — meowing is a property, not the species-making difference.
• What is wisdom, if “the best knowledge”? Knowledge of the best thing — the universe, or rather its maker: knowledge of God, the first cause.