Part 1: How the understanding knows its own act, with angels, the letter analogy, Russell's sophism and knowing the will (ST I q.87 a.3–4)

Orientation #

The class opens on the tail of last time’s principle (“more known and less known … what’s more desirable”), which he calls “very important” with many applications, then the prayer (prev. lecture). Later he recalls having done the Anaxagoras fragment “one time … with some of you”. The recording ends inside the reply to the first objection of a. 4; the remaining replies are not reached here. The previous class treated a. 2 (habits known through their acts) and the principle propter quod unumquodque; the next continues q. 87 a. 4 replies and opens q. 88.

The class, in order #

1. Article 3, the objections (“the understanding does not know its own act”) #

The point: three objections that the understanding knows only its object, not its act.

• Obj. 1: what is properly known is the object of the power; the act differs from the object; so, as the eye doesn’t know seeing but colour, and the ear not hearing but sound, the understanding doesn’t know its act. He notes this “happens to I think, therefore I am.”
• Obj. 2: whatever is known is known by some act; so the act would be known by another act, and so on forever, “which seems impossible.” His aside: “I don’t see a difficulty” in knowing what a triangle is, knowing that I know it, and so on — one just doesn’t want to continue because there’s not much more to be known.
• Obj. 3: as sense stands to its act, so the understanding; but sense doesn’t sense its act, that belongs to the common sense (De Anima); so neither does the understanding.
• His counter before reading the answer: if the understanding didn’t know its own act “there would be no logic” — logic arises precisely because the understanding can think about its own act.
• “Know thyself” (the seven wise men): addressed to man, who can know himself but doesn’t; more to the soul than the body (the body doesn’t know what a body is); “in a very special way” to reason, which can know what reason is and the other parts too, whereas anger doesn’t know anger, the hand doesn’t know the hand, the will doesn’t know the will.
• Sed contra: Augustine, De Trinitate X, “I understand myself to understand.”

2. The corpus: three understandings (“each thing is known according as it is in act”) #

The point: a thing is known as it is in act; the understanding’s last perfection is its operation, which remains in the doer (Metaphysics IX), so what is first understood about the understanding is its act — but differently in God, angel and man.

1. Understanding is not a making. Making perfects the thing made (building perfects the house); operation like understanding remains in and perfects the one doing. Making is for the sake of the thing made; understanding is for its own sake.
   • Aside: Marx and Engels are “in a real difficulty” making the highest thing in man a making — making McDonald hamburgers all one’s life perfects hamburgers, not the maker. Man’s greatest perfection must be in an act like understanding.
2. Divine understanding is its own act (no composition in God): to understand itself to understand and to understand its essence are the same.
3. Angelic understanding is not its own act (as said in the treatise on angels), but the first object of its act is its own nature; so by one and the same act it understands its nature and its understanding, since the act is the proper perfection of the nature, and a thing is understood together with its perfection.
4. Human understanding is neither its own act nor has its own nature as first object, but something outside: the nature of a material thing (“the child is thinking of his toy”). So the object is known first, secondarily the act, and through the act the power.

• His ordered chain: I understand what a triangle is, before I understand that I understand it, before I understand that I have the ability to understand, before I know that my soul is not entirely immersed in matter. This is Aristotle’s De Anima order: objects before acts, acts before powers.
• Ethics parallel: object before act before virtue — eating moderately is more known to us than moderation; acting bravely more than courage. “Sometimes you don’t know whether you have the virtue of courage until you get on the battlefield.” George Washington’s instructions to the troops (retreat without orders and be shot), the marine officer behind you: “you might as well be a dead hero than a dead coward” — so we don’t know how many men really have courage.

3. Reply 1: the object is being and truth, but in material things (“something very common … being and truth”) #

The point: the object of the understanding is so common — being and truth — that the act itself falls under it; but not first, because in this state the first object is being and truth considered in material things.

• The Greeks’ “you can’t get something out of nothing”: anything that is comes under something; so there is “something kind of infinite about our mind” — knowing the difference between something and nothing it is open to knowing anything.
• Anaxagoras, “the great fragment” (DK 12): the first thing he says of mind is that it is infinite — not in extent like the materialists’ air (he also calls mind the thinnest of things), but in its object: not limited to colour like the eye or sound like the ear, nor even to the sensible. Second thing: mind is self-ruling. His connection: it couldn’t be self-ruling unless self-knowing; and a mind infinite in object (e.g. knowing “no odd number is even” covers an infinity) can know not only other things but itself. So infinite → self-knowing → self-ruling.
• “That’s very important what he’s saying there”: being and truth in rebus materialibus, from which we go to knowledge of all else.
• Physics IV: the common opinion of the earlier Greeks that whatever is must be somewhere, and what isn’t somewhere doesn’t exist — identifying what is with what is in place, i.e. substance with body. Still the common thought today, even among Christians who ask where the separated soul will be (“some gray somewhere”). Cause: we think with images, images are continuous, so we imagine everything in place; but neither God nor angels nor the separated soul are in place.
• Metaphysics IX (“the ninth book of wisdom”) shows the ascent: part one treats act and ability as tied to motion and material things; part two rises to act as found even in immaterial things; part three brings out the order showing the first cause is pure act.
• “Bad Thomists” quote Thomas quoting Avicenna, “the first thing our mind understands is being,” and identify it with being as being, the subject of wisdom. But the being we first know is being in material things; only after some proof that something immaterial exists does the mind separate substance from body and eventually see immaterial substances as more substances than bodies.
• Student: is that mistake what they call “the intuition of being”? — “it could be, yeah.” Cajetan’s phrase for what is first understood: ens concretum in quidditate sensibili, being concrete in a sensible what-it-is.
• Student: did [name unclear in recording; sounds like “Joe Song”] fall into that snare? — “He might have … I can’t remember.”
• Further evidence: our statements have noun and verb, and the verb signifies with time, so we think everything as continuous, in place and in time; the work on sense and the sensible (inferred: De sensu) — we don’t think without images.
• Hence God is known negatively in this life (“God is not a body”). The definition of eternity, tota simul et perfecta possessio vitae interminabilis: interminabilis negates the beginning and end that life in time has; but that is not enough, or eternity would be endless time (Berquist existing every year back and forward still has before and after). Tota simul negates before and after: here eternity resembles the now of time, which strictly taken is indivisible like a point on a line — but the now of time is always other; Boethius: the flowing now makes time, the standing now makes eternity. Hence possessio: no otherness. Fairy-book image: the witch’s spell freezes the court, the servant with one leg in the air until the prince’s kiss — in a standing now of time we’d have practically no life (“you can’t eat a carrot in the now”), but God in the standing now has perfect possession of life. Count: two negations of time and two referring to the now. This is the via negationis; compare q. 3, where God’s simplicity is shown by negating six kinds of composition and concluding in the seventh article that there is none.
• Closing the reply: the act does come under the object, but in an order; you first know that the what-it-is is something sensed or imagined; geometry, where you see you understand universally, is later the clue to the mind’s immateriality — “a little bit of Euclid before you study the De Anima.”

4. Reply 2: a different act, and the infinite in potency (“not the act and perfection of the nature understood”) #

The point: since man’s act of understanding is not the perfection of the material nature understood, it is not by one act that I know the stone and my knowing of it; so the acts differ, and an infinite in potency is not inconvenient.

• Angel vs. man: the angel’s act perfects its own substance, which is its first object, so one act grasps both. Berquist understanding a triangle: the understanding perfects Berquist, not the triangle, so knowing the triangle and knowing that I know it are different acts. Likeness: hearing Mozart’s music I hear its perfection by the same hearing; the triangle’s perfection is not mine (though understanding it is some perfection of me, not the greatest). Thomas’s example is a stone, “much more concrete than me.”
• Augustine anticipated Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am,” using it against the Academics: doubt everything, you can’t doubt that you’re thinking; and if I know I’m thinking I can know that I know it, and so on — an infinity of things I can know, against the sceptics, though “not the biggest things.”
• His “deficient” material likeness: a letter recounting what was in a letter written to you; that can go on forever, but the first letter ever written can’t be about what’s in a letter — it must be about the world. His mother as conduit for the brothers’ letters. So the first thing understood is not our understanding but a stone or triangle; once that’s in, the mind can come back on itself.
• Relation of reason: “Socrates is Socrates” — not two Socrates, but the mind takes him twice, and can say the statement is itself, forever; a kind of infinity in the mind, beings of reason, “very strange, not too important in some ways.”
• Bertrand Russell against the axiom that the whole is larger than its part: match every whole number to its double; so the evens equal all the numbers, and the part equals the whole. Student: is the 2 in the one column the same 2 as in the other, or multiplied as we multiplied Socrates? His answer: it’s a mental multiplication, a being of reason — you can get as many twos as you want by saying “two is two” (Charles Peirce: I can do it with two alone); Russell confuses the being of the numbers with this mental being. Parody: Berquist is Berquist is Berquist, so one man is as much as all of you. The sophist attacks an axiom and average people can’t solve it.
• His own classroom sophism: animal is only part of man (animal with reason), yet animal includes dog, cat, horse; so the part is more than the whole. Solution: in the definition, man is a composed whole of genus and difference and is always more than the genus; but “animal includes dog, cat” takes animal as a universal whole, said of more. Each kind of whole contains or is said of more than its part; two senses, which students can’t distinguish. Aristotle: the commonest mistake in thinking is mixing senses of one word.
• Second sophism, from teaching the start of the Physics: Aristotle says we know the general before the particular (because confused before distinct — “liquid” before “water,” “book” before “theology book”), yet knowledge begins in the senses, which know particulars. Solution: “particular” sometimes means the singular (“you are a particular man”), sometimes the less universal (“the dog is a particular kind of animal”); Boethius: the thing is singular as sensed, universal as understood. Order: singular, then more universal, then less universal.
• Follow-up objection: shouldn’t the less universal come first, being closer to the singular (Socrates → man before animal)? Answer: we know confusedly first. Classifying the plants on the grounds from your own senses: you’d see grass vs. tree before kinds of grass. His botany class: needle-leaf vs. broad-leaf never confused, but he never learned Norway pine from other pines. Sampling drinks: beer vs. wine before Budweiser vs. Miller or Cabernet vs. Pinot Noir. Dog vs. cat before kinds of dog. “All that’s just kind of an aside.”
• His summary of the reply’s “very interesting point”: if what I first understood were my soul or mind, the first thing I could understand might be my understanding, since that’s a perfection of the mind — but it isn’t a perfection of the stone. That’s why the wise men’s “know thyself” is a reasonable exhortation: to one who can know himself (unlike animals) but doesn’t (unlike angels, who know themselves perfectly at once).

5. Reply 3: sense vs. understanding (“the private sense senses according to the change of a material organ”) #

The point: the proper (“private”) sense senses by a material organ being changed by an exterior sensible, and nothing material changes itself, so its act is perceived by the common sense; the understanding involves no material change, so the cases are unlike.

• What acts upon and what undergoes are not the same in a material organ; but I can understand my understanding, and the will can love its loving — an argument from the treatise on charity, whether one can love not only God and neighbour but one’s loving of them. “Some people are in love with love too.” Short break.

6. Article 4, objections and corpus (“the act of the will is nothing other than a certain inclination”) #

The point: the will’s act is known by the understanding because it is intelligibly present in the one understanding.

• Obj. 1: nothing is understood unless present in the understanding; the will’s act is in a different power. (His gloss: then how can I know that I love wisdom?) Obj. 2: an act is specified by its object; the will’s object is the good, the understanding’s the truth; so its species differs and it isn’t known. Obj. 3: Augustine, Confessions X, says the affections are known neither by images (as bodies) nor by presence (as the arts) but by “certain notions”; but the soul has no notions except natures or likenesses of things known.
• Sed contra: De Trinitate X, “I understand myself to will” (“not correct English, but what the Latin says”).
• Corpus: the will’s act is an inclination following on the form understood, as natural desire follows the natural form (acquire a nature, you have its inclination); sense desire and will follow on a form sensed or understood. Each inclination is in its thing in its own way: naturally in the natural thing; sensibly in the one sensing — his guess why we call emotions “feelings” (“you hurt my feelings”; I feel sad, angry); intelligibly in the one understanding, as in a beginning and its own subject — hence the Philosopher (De Anima III) says the will is in reason, which Thomas sometimes qualifies as “in the rational part.” What is intelligibly in the one understanding is understood by him: one perceives oneself to will, knows the nature of the act, and consequently its source, the habit or power. Example: you know your friendship (a habit) through knowing the goodwill you have toward the person.

7. Reply 1: rooted in one substance, not entirely immersed (“not entirely immersed in matter”) #

The point: the objection assumes that because understanding and will are diverse powers they differ in subject; but both are rooted in the one substance of the soul and one is in a way the beginning of the other (the good as understood is willed, as the good as sensed rouses feelings), so what is in the will is in a way in the understanding — “members of each other” — and both are in the part of the soul that rises above matter.

• The word “immersed”: a dog’s or plant’s soul is under the water entirely; ours floats, part above. We know it because it has acts, understanding and willing, not in the body. Dog: no operation except in and through the body; angel: entirely separate; our soul is the first act of a natural body with organs (“tools”), yet not every power is in an organ. The body shares in the soul’s existence, but not entirely.
• “We’re a very strange creature”: Shakespeare somewhere says we’re all bastards; half angel, half beast; Democritus, a little cosmos, microcosm of material and immaterial — part of the suitability of the Word becoming human rather than angel, taking back the whole of creation.
• Bias of Priene (one of the seven wise men, with “know thyself,” “nothing too much”): most men are bad — the basis of the American principle of dividing power; Aristotle in the Rhetoric on fear lists being in the power of another man, since “men do bad whenever they can.” Recording ends here; replies 2 and 3 not reached.

His words #

• “Natural Hearing”: his rendering of the Physics [ed.: Physics].
• “ability” and “act”: for potency and act [ed.: potency]; “the ninth book of wisdom” for Metaphysics IX.
• “understanding” (intellectus): both the power and the act; he notes the word is taken for the power in the corpus.
• “private sense”: the proper sense [ed.: sensus proprius] as against the common sense.
• in rebus materialibus: “being and truth considered in material things,” what is first known.
• ens concretum in quidditate sensibili: Cajetan’s phrase for what is first understood.
• tota simul et perfecta possessio vitae interminabilis: definition of eternity, read as two negations of time and two of the now.
• via negationis / via negativa: how we know God’s eternity and simplicity.
• relation of reason / being of reason: the mind taking one thing twice (“Socrates is Socrates”).
• composed whole vs. universal whole: definition (genus plus difference) vs. genus said of many.
• “particular”: singular, or the less universal; “general”: the more universal.
• sensibiliter in the one sensing: how sense desire is present; his source for “feelings.”
• “immersed in matter”: Thomas’s word for the soul of dog and plant; ours only partly.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 87, a. 3, whole article (translated and commented).
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 87, a. 4, objections, sed contra, corpus, reply 1.
• Boethius, definition of eternity (quoted in Latin and explained); Boethius on the flowing and standing now.

Mentioned

• Aristotle, De Anima: objects known before acts, acts before powers; common sense perceives the act of sense; III, will is in reason.
• Aristotle, Metaphysics IX: operation remains in the doer; the three parts of the book.
• Aristotle, Physics IV: whatever is must be somewhere; Physics I: general known before particular.
• Aristotle, work on sense and the sensible: we don’t think without images; Rhetoric, on fear.
• Anaxagoras, fragment DK 12.
• Augustine, De Trinitate X (both sed contras); Confessions X (obj. 3 of a. 4); Augustine against the Academics.
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 3 (six compositions negated, seventh article); treatise on the angels; treatise on charity (loving one’s loving); Avicenna on being as first known; Cajetan’s commentary on the Summa.
• Descartes, “I think, therefore I am”; Marx and Engels; Bertrand Russell; Charles Peirce; Democritus; Bias of Priene; Shakespeare; Euclid.

His questions #

• If the understanding didn’t know its own act, what would follow? There would be no logic.
• To whom is “know thyself” most specially addressed? To reason, which alone can know what it is (not anger, hand, or will).
• Is making a perfecting of the maker? Not as such; it perfects the thing made — so man’s greatest perfection is in an act like understanding.
• In what sense does Anaxagoras call the mind infinite? In its object, not in extent; hence self-knowing and self-ruling.
• Is that mistaken first object of the mind what they call “the intuition of being”? (student) It could be; the being first known is being in material things.
• Why is it not by one act that I understand a triangle and that I understand it? Because my understanding is a perfection of me, not of the triangle; unlike the angel.
• What’s wrong with Russell’s part-equals-whole argument? The twos are multiplied mentally; it confuses beings of reason with the numbers.
• Would you see grass vs. tree first, or kinds of grass? Beer vs. wine, or Budweiser vs. Miller? The more universal first, because we know confusedly before distinctly.
• Why can the will’s act be in the understanding though they are diverse powers? Both are rooted in the one substance of the soul and one is the beginning of the other.
• How do we know the soul is not entirely immersed in matter? It has acts, understanding and willing, that are not in the body.