Part 2: Truth and good, wits and dimwits, self-rule of the mind, and whether we can know immaterial substances (ST I q.87 a.4 – q.88 a.1)

Orientation #

He begins mid-article, at the reply to the second objection of the article on whether the understanding knows the act of the will (q. 87 a. 4, verified), and says “we should start to look at the next one”, opening q. 88. He recalls telling the class before about the “great fragment of Anaxagoras” and the story “They’re more real than you are” (“I told you that story”). The previous class treated q. 87 on the intellect’s knowledge of its own act; the next continues q. 88 a. 1 with Averroes’s separate agent intellect.

The class, in order #

1. Reply to the second objection: true and good each a part of the other (“each is a part of the other”) #

Point: the good and the true, objects of will and understanding, differ in definition, yet each is contained under the other.

1. Truth is a particular good (there are other goods besides truth).
2. The good is a particular truth (there is truth about the good as there is truth about dogs).
3. So the object of understanding is a particular good, and the object of the will is a particular truth: “each is a part of the other, according to its object.” Conclusion: reason can know the truth about the good and about the will, and the will can will the good of the reason; hence they can have causality with respect to each other (“both principles of each other”). He flags this “very, very amazing thing”, “absolutely amazing.”

2. Digression: the will’s influence on the use of reason — pride and docility (“the mother of error”) #

Point: the will determines whether and how I apply my reason, for ill (pride) or good (docility).

• Dion’s course on the role of the will in the use of reason, following the movements of Augustine’s will through the Confessions: Monica asks the bishop to talk to Augustine; the bishop says “not yet” — Augustine not yet disposed, lacking docility of the will.
• Pride is in the will; in the Summa Contra Gentiles Thomas calls it mater erroris, mother of mistakes. In the commentary on St Paul, pride causes error in two ways: (a) the proud man judges what is beyond his powers, thinking himself better than he is (or ready before he is ready); (b) he does not listen to those wiser than himself, so he is not called back from his mistakes (Berquist: “how many times I’ve been pulled back from mistakes by Kasurik or by Dion… or by Thomas or by Aristotle”).
• Docility, in the Secunda Secundae: the will to hear or read the words of those greater than us “carefully, frequently, and with reverence.”
• This partly requires knowing yourself.

3. Hesiod’s three men: wits, dim wits, nitwits (“the wits, the dim wits, and the nitwits”) #

Point: knowing yourself includes knowing which of Hesiod’s three kinds you are.

• Hesiod (quoted with approval by Aristotle in the Nicomachean Ethics, approved by Thomas in his commentary; the same division in Basil’s exhortation on reading the Greeks, and even in Machiavelli): best is he who discovers things himself; next, he who learns from the discoverer; third, he who can do neither.
• Berquist’s playful names: wits, dim wits, nitwits. The problem: a dim wit who out of pride thinks he is a wit becomes “his own man”, does not learn from the true wits — “a real impediment to the life of the mind.”
• His further subdivision: upper dim wits know who the wits are (he classes himself here: geometry → Euclid, logic → Aristotle, theology → Thomas and Augustine); lower dim wits do not.
• Aside: the academic platitude, on graduation day, of praising the faculty for teaching students “to think for ourselves.”

4. Anaxagoras: the mind is self-ruling, yet the ruler must be separated from the ruled (“the ruler must be separated from the ruled”) #

Point: an apparent contradiction between two truths in Anaxagoras’s fragment, and its solution.

• Truth 1: mind is self-ruling. Sign: logic exists, the art whereby reason directs not the hand or foot but itself.
• Truth 2: the greater mind is unmixed with matter because it could not rule over what it was mixed with — the ruler must be separated from the ruled. Signs: the first thing demanded of a judge is that he be impartial, literally “not a part of”; in the army the inferior salutes first.
• The contradiction: the mind is not separate from itself.
• Solution, imitating Socrates in the Republic (asked whether he wants to appear to convince or really convince, he “blows it up big” by comparing parts of the soul to parts of the city): a colony has no self-rule; once independent it does — but self-rule means one part (the government) rules the other parts, not the whole ruling the whole. Harder case: self-control means reason ruling the emotions, still one part ruling another; if reason is mixed up with the emotions it cannot rule them (Plato’s man and horse; Washington Irving on how quickly wild horses are tamed).
• Hardest case: reason has no parts (Anaxagoras: mind is “the thinnest of all things”). The separation within reason is Socrates’s: separating what one knows from what one does not know, which almost everyone he talked to had not done. The mind rules itself in what it does not know by what it does know — knowing the length and width of the blackboard and that I multiply rules what I say about its area. So those who have not made the separation “can’t think for themselves” yet; Aristotle went further, separating the more known from the less known and the most known from everything else.
• Charles De Koninck: the history of modern philosophy can be done as “the denial of the more known by the less known.”

5. Back to the reply: why intellect and will differ from eye and ear (“the good is what all want”) #

Point: the containment of each object under the other is what distinguishes intellect–will from two sense powers.

• Eye vs. ear: sound is not a particular colour nor colour a particular sound, so the eye cannot know what the ear knows nor what hearing is, and vice versa.
• Understanding vs. will: the understanding knows the truth about the good (the first thing said in ethics: “the good is what all want”); the will wills not only the good of the body but the good of reason, truth being a particular, very important, but not the only good. My will extends to truth, food, Mozart; my reason knows the truth about the good, about food, about Mozart.
• Hence “those things which are of the will fall under the understanding,” and vice versa: I can understand that I will, and I can will that I understand — the use of the understanding depends on the will.

6. Reply to the third objection: Augustine’s “notions” (“as a thing that has a beginning is in its beginning”) #

Point: how the affections of the soul are in the understanding.

• Not by likeness only, as bodies are (representations of bodies, not bodies, are in reason).
• Not by presence as in a subject, as art is (art is right reason about making, so it is in reason itself).
• But as a thing having a beginning is in its beginning: the good is understood as object of the will, i.e. as its beginning. That is why Augustine says the affections are in the memory “through certain notions” — “Augustine’s strange way of speaking,” which Thomas is explaining.

7. Question 88 opened: below, itself, above; Shakespeare’s five reasons to use reason (“godlike reason to fust in us unused”) #

Point: Thomas orders the soul’s knowledge by what is below it, itself, and above it (the immaterial substances) — the same three-fold comparison Berquist finds in Hamlet’s exhortation to use reason.

• Hamlet’s lines yield five reasons: one from what is below man (unused reason, “a beast no more”); two from what is above (reason is “godlike” — using it well makes us wise, like God; and He who made us did not give reason to go unused — following God’s plan); two from man himself (man’s chief good is more than a beast’s and involves reason; Polonius’s “to thine own self be true” — you cannot be true to yourself without using reason). Each alone is more than sufficient.
• Aside on Shakespeare: the wisest of the poets, wiser than any modern philosopher, yet in Midsummer Night’s Dream he says lover, madman and poet are all “compact of imagination,” the source of deception and error. Plato and Shakespeare are unusual: philosopher with poetic gifts, poet with philosophical gifts; usually one follows imagination or reason. Homer too is “kind of wise”; where Shakespeare’s wisdom came from is unknown.
• The three articles: (1) whether the soul in this life can understand immaterial substances through themselves; (2) if not, whether through material things; (3) the strange position of some Christian thinkers that God is first known by us.
• Naming: “angel” (messenger — to Tobias, the Blessed Virgin, Joseph in a dream) is the Bible’s name; philosophy says immaterial or separated substances.

8. Objection 1: Augustine, the mind knows the bodiless through itself (“a gateway for us to the immaterial world”) #

Point: Augustine (De Trinitate IX): as the mind gathers knowledge of bodies through the senses, so through itself it gains knowledge of bodiless things; therefore we understand the immaterial substances.

• Berquist’s gloss: knowledge of our own understanding soul is the gateway to the immaterial world; only by seeing in ourselves the connection between understanding and immateriality do we know that angels and God understand. Our soul’s separability from matter gives the clue to substances whose very nature is to be separate, not forms of a body. The study of the soul stands “at the horizon” between the material and immaterial worlds.
• Aside: scripture somewhere says God has a soul — said almost metaphorically; striking to see.

9. Objection 2: like is known by like (“They’re more real than you are”) #

Point: the mind is more like immaterial things than material, and knowing is by likeness; since it knows material things, much more the immaterial.

• Aside on how fuzzy even Catholics’ thinking about angels is: the seminary student who asked “Do angels really exist?” — “They’re more real than you are”; the philosopher cousin’s wife who thought angel-talk a fairy tale; the current fashion of angels as “some kind of pretty thing.” People always fall back to thinking whatever exists must be a body (“out of sight, out of mind”). The guardian-angel picture in his boyhood bedroom; his brother Richard’s framed Fra Angelico angels — if one is to draw angels, Fra Angelico is the one to go to (with wings, impressive).
• Aside: a “conspiracy” to eliminate the word “soul” from Bible translations (even the Magnificat) and the Catechism translation.

10. Objection 3: excelling sensibles corrupt the sense, excelling intelligibles do not (“more knowable to us is less knowable”) #

Point: what is most sensible is not most sensed by us because excess corrupts the sense; excess does not corrupt the understanding; therefore what is most understandable is most understood by us.

• Excess corrupts sense: light too bright blinds (leaving a dark theatre in the afternoon); very hot Chinese food or a child’s lemon drops kill taste.
• Excess does not corrupt understanding — Aristotle’s sign in the De Anima of the understanding’s immateriality: after the “workout” of the treatise on the Trinity, one understands Euclid’s triangle better, not worse; after philosophy one appreciates good music better (music is less understandable, since it represents the emotions, reasonable only by partaking of reason; 18th-century music is better than Romantic because it represents them in a reasonable state).
• Berquist flags “a little jump” in the objection: Aristotle says excess does not prevent turning to lesser things, not that the more understandable is the more understood; he says the reverse — our soul is to the most understandable (God, the angels) as the bat’s eyes to daylight (he thought bats fly at night because the day is too bright). Cause enlightens effect, yet we know effect more than cause, and the first cause least: what is most enlightening is hidden from us; God “dwells in light inaccessible.” Thomas will apply this to the objection.
• Physics, beginning: the confused is more known to us, the distinct more knowable; “what is more knowable to us is less knowable… and what is less understood by us is more understandable.” Reason: our mind goes from ability to act, so imperfect knowledge (of the imperfectly knowable) comes first. “Very hard to see when you first hear that”; one could write a doctoral thesis on that page.
• The same in every education, since each develops something from imperfect to perfect:
  • body: the 5BX / Royal Canadian Air Force graduated plan — twenty push-ups are more productive of strength, but five are more productive for you; lifting 100 vs. 500 pounds likewise.
  • will: what is more lovable to us at first is less lovable — candy before wisdom; things other than God before God; the private good before the common good, though the common good, good of the whole, is greater. We are led by what is less lovable but more lovable to us toward what is more lovable but less lovable to us.
  • taste: his father’s refrigerator without soda pop; now he prefers wine, which has far more to taste (red wine at cellar temperature; Coke at that temperature tastes of nothing); hot dog before marchand de vin sauce; beginners like white wine, the experienced prefer red.
  • hearing and painting: marches on the radio as a child, now Mozart.
• Bernard of Clairvaux, On the Love of God, four stages: we love not God but other things; then God for the sake of something else (in need); then God for his own sake, having grown familiar; last, oneself only for the sake of God — hardly realised in this life. I am more lovable to me at first than God, who is infinitely more lovable, goodness itself (Augustine, Thomas).
• Knowing: the proof of God’s existence goes from motion, which hardly exists (part always gone, part not yet — is any part ever there?), to God, pure act and most knowable; yet motion seems most real (“things in motion sooner catch the eye than what not stirs,” Shakespeare).
• Imagination: a child struck by Little Red Riding Hood, not by King Lear or Hamlet; the adult exhausts Red Riding Hood, but books on Hamlet never exhaust it — more for the imagination there. Painting: the Botticelli room in the Uffizi (one keeps seeing more); his mother’s Christmas cards — the eye drifts to the reproduced nativity, the simple modern drawings are exhausted at once.
• Summary he gives: what is more tasted by us is less tasty, more imagined is less imaginable, more heard is less to be heard — and the same holds of reason itself.

11. Objection 4: the Commentator — nature does nothing idly (“nature would have done something idly”) #

Point: Averroes on Metaphysics II: if the abstract substances cannot be understood by us, nature would have made what is in itself understandable understood by no other, and nature does nothing in vain; therefore we can understand them.

• Berquist anticipates Thomas’s reply: the angels understand each other, so they are not understood by no one.
• Aside: Averroes is “the Commentator” of the Middle Ages, but Thomas should really be the Commentator by antonomasia, since Aristotle means what Thomas says, not always what Averroes says.
• Asides on fineness of discrimination not lost on everyone: subtle differences in wines he is unsure he tastes (his father-in-law: “they’re all the same”); the teas he serves in class that he could not tell apart blind, though the tea-seller could; his brother Mark’s Detroit painters and “what interesting shade of green”; women’s names for shades (“that’s aqua, not blue”); Mozart’s letters — things only a connoisseur appreciates, yet written so everyone likes them, which cannot be done in philosophy; the package-store man who had not opened a book since high school but still recalled Jaques’s seven ages of man (As You Like It).

12. Objection 5 and the sed contra; Anaxagoras’s mind is angelic (“who can investigate them”) #

Point: as sense to sensibles, so understanding to intelligibles; sight sees all bodies, higher (the incorruptible heavenly bodies, as the ancients thought) and lower; therefore understanding understands all intelligible substances, higher and lower.

• Sed contra: Wisdom 9, the things in the heavens, who can investigate them? and Matthew 18, “the angels of them in the heavens”; therefore we cannot know the immaterial substances by human investigation.
• His view: Anaxagoras’s “greater mind” is an angelic, not the divine, mind — it moves matter by change of place, as angels do, but does not create it; matter’s existence is independent of it. The recording ends here; the body of the article is not reached.

His words #

• “the understanding” / “reason”: intellectus [ed.: intellect].
• “differ in their definition”: ad 2, of true and good.
• mater erroris: pride as “the mother of mistakes” (Summa Contra Gentiles).
• docility: the will to hear or read “carefully, frequently, and with reverence” the words of those greater than us.
• wits / dim wits / nitwits; upper and lower dim wits: his names for Hesiod’s three (and a fourth) kinds of mind.
• “self-ruling”: Anaxagoras’s second predicate of mind; logic as reason directing itself.
• impartial: literally “not a part of.”
• “the thinnest of all things”: Anaxagoras on mind.
• “notions”: Augustine’s word for how the affections are in the memory (ad 3).
• “art is right reason about making”: why art is present in reason as in a subject.
• immaterial / separated substances: the philosopher’s name for what the Bible calls angels (“messenger”).
• “horizon”: the study of the soul, between the material and immaterial worlds.
• “excellences” / “excelling qualities”: excellentiae sensibilium [ed.: excess of the sensible object].
• “ability to act”: our mind’s movement [ed.: from potency to act].
• “the commentator by antonomasia”: Thomas rather than Averroes.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 87, a. 4, ad 2 and ad 3 (verified).
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 88, prologue; a. 1, objections 1–5 and sed contra.
• Augustine, De Trinitate IX (as quoted in obj. 1).
• Averroes, comm. on Metaphysics II (as quoted in obj. 4).
• Wisdom 9; Matthew 18 (sed contra).
• Shakespeare, Hamlet (the exhortation to use reason; Polonius’s “to thine own self be true”), from memory.
• handout: “Pride as a Cause of Error”, p. 8 (verified).

Mentioned

• Thomas, Summa Contra Gentiles (pride as mater erroris); commentary on St Paul (two ways pride causes error); Secunda Secundae (docility); commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics (Hesiod).
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (Hesiod’s three men); Physics I, beginning (more known to us / more knowable); De Anima (excess does not corrupt the understanding; bat’s eyes and daylight).
• Augustine, Confessions (Monica and the bishop).
• Basil, exhortation on reading the Greeks; Machiavelli.
• Anaxagoras, the “great fragment” on mind.
• Plato, Republic I–II; the cave; man and horse.
• Washington Irving, Tour of the West (inferred: A Tour on the Prairies).
• Shakespeare, Midsummer Night’s Dream; As You Like It (seven ages); King Lear.
• Bernard of Clairvaux, On the Love of God.
• Charles De Koninck (on modern philosophy).
• Mozart’s letters; Fra Angelico; Botticelli in the Uffizi.
• Printed volume: DHB Vol. III, The School of Aristotle, p. 1009 (verified source; passage not identified in transcript).

His questions #

• How can truth be the object of reason and yet be “a particular good”, and the good “a particular truth”? Each is a part of the other according to its object, so reason knows the truth about the good and the will wills the good of reason.
• In what two ways does pride cause error? By judging what is beyond one’s powers, and by not listening to those wiser than oneself.
• Are you a wit, a dim wit or a nitwit — and if a dim wit, do you know who the wits are? Berquist: he is an “upper dim wit”; the danger is a dim wit thinking he is a wit.
• If the ruler must be separated from the ruled, how can the mind be self-ruling? As in a country or in self-control, one part rules another; in reason, what is known rules what is not yet known, once the two are separated (Socrates).
• Why can the understanding know the will, when the eye cannot know what the ear knows? Sound is no colour and colour no sound, but truth is a particular good and the good a particular truth.
• Which is more productive of strength, five push-ups or twenty? Twenty in itself; five for you, if you can only do five — as with all education, from imperfect to perfect.
• Which is more understandable, philosophy or music? Philosophy; music represents the emotions, reasonable only by partaking of reason.
• Which is more knowable, the cause or the effect, and which do we know more? The cause enlightens, yet we know the effect more; the first cause is hardest for us.
• Does the objection follow Aristotle in saying the more understandable is the more understood by us? No — “a little jump”; Aristotle says the reverse (bat’s eyes to daylight).
• Is Anaxagoras’s greater mind the divine mind? He holds it is an angelic mind: it moves matter but does not create it.