Metaphysics IX, Chapter 10: Truth and Falsity in the Mind's Composing and Dividing

Orientation #

He opens by saying we are “down to the eleventh reading,” a continuation of the last reading where Aristotle showed that something is knowable to the extent it is act; now he turns to truth. He closes the reading and the “preliminary reading of Book Nine,” and says we will now carry philosophy into the study of theology. The previous class covered readings ten and eleven of the commentary on Book IX (prev. lecture).

The class, in order #

1. Why good comes before true (“Aristotle immediately after perfect takes up good”) #

The point: the order perfect → good → true in Aristotle is deliberate and illuminates Thomas.

• Aristotle has shown act is more perfect than passive ability, therefore better, and now also more true. But he takes up good before true, as if good is more closely connected with perfect.
• Parallel in the Summa Theologiae, Prima Pars: on the substance of God he treats simple, perfect, infinite, unchanging, one — in that order — attaching to some of them a consequent question: eternity follows on unchangeableness (as in natural philosophy the treatment of time follows that of motion, so negating motion is followed by negating time, i.e. eternity); being everywhere (ubique) follows on infinity; goodness follows on perfection.
• But truth of God is not treated there: it comes only in the treatise on the operations of God, after his understanding — and the will is treated only after the understanding too.
• The reason lies in Book Six of wisdom: good and bad are chiefly in things, true and false primarily in the mind. He says that when he first studied the Prima Pars in a college course on Natural Theology he did not see the significance of this; “when I saw the sixth book of wisdom, then a light broke upon me. Aristotle illuminated me.”

2. Same knowledge of opposites, not the same love (“there can be the same knowledge of opposites”) #

Consequence of the Book Six doctrine.

• One science of ethics treats virtue and the vices opposed to it; medical art knows sickness through health. Knowing one opposite helps you know the other, because knowing brings the thing into the mind.
• Love goes out to the thing in itself, and in things one opposite excludes the other: love of virtue impedes love of vice, and vice versa.
• Example attached: pages are printed black on white, because opposites stand out in contrast — that is how knowing works, not how love works.
• Aside: Plato in the Republic and Symposium approaches the first thing as the good itself and the beautiful itself, not as the true itself — though it is that too; you would see that only once you saw that the first thing understands, and so there is truth in the first cause.

3. The text opens: being according to the figures of predicates (“Since being and non-being are set”) #

• “Figures of predicates” refers back to the ten categories; category is Greek for “set up,” and the Latins call the book the predicamenta. His English joke: “the ten sit-ups.”
• Being is also said by ability or act of these. Examples: I am able to be five foot ten, now I actually am; something is able to be a man or a dog, and now actually is.
• Act can be said even of God, who is not in one of the ten. So the division of ability and act is more universal than the division by the figures of predication; it extends even to mental being.
• Then: “this being is chiefly true or false” — and here Aristotle begins from what is obvious, tying it to the mind: being put together or divided.

4. The acts of reason and why Thomas says “composing and dividing” (“composition and division”) #

• First act: apprehension — simple apprehension, “simple grasping,” grasping what something is, however imperfectly; he also calls it understanding what a thing is. Second act: composition and division.
• Thomas always goes back to Aristotle’s text in the third book About the Soul. “Division” here means a negative statement — man is not a stone divides man and stone; man is an animal puts them together.
• Why not “judgment”? Because the logic of the second act does not use the word judgment: it treats what a statement is, divides statements into affirmative and negative, and determines which are opposed contradictorily — same subject, same predicate, one affirmative one negative, such that they cannot both be true nor both false, one must be true and the other false. But it gives no help as to which side is the true one.
• In the tradition, scientia judicandi (the science of judging) names the Prior and Posterior Analytics, judgment taken as certitude, not in the contemporary sense of “judgmental” — because for the most part judging results from reasoning. Example: the forty-eight theorems of Euclid Book One you judge true by demonstration; only the few obvious statements are judged true without reasoning.

5. Digression: belief as assenting while thinking (“assentire cum cogitatione”) #

Occasioned by the two sides of a contradiction; he says “we’ll have to see that sometime, maybe.”

• Thomas takes up the act of faith in the Secunda Secundae, the De Veritate, and the Sentences (also in the commentary on Hebrews where the definition of faith is given), going back to Augustine, On the Predestination of the Saints, ch. 2: to believe is assentire cum cogitatione, to assent while thinking about it.
• The states of mind between the two sides of a contradiction:
  1. Doubt — not inclined to either side, either because there is no reason for either, or because the reasons balance; the mind is in suspense.
  2. Suspicion / opinion (Thomas distinguishes these in the Peri Hermeneias) — inclined to one side without a reason showing it must be so, with fear that the opposite may be so; so not a full assent.
  3. Full assent, of which there are three kinds: the assent of nous / intellectus / natural understanding, to the obvious (the whole is more than a part) — assent without having to think about it; the assent of demonstration (the Pythagorean theorem) — assent as the result of thinking it out; and the assent of faith — assent while thinking about it.
• Augustine’s definition thus separates faith from both other assents. In faith reason assents firmly, moved not by evidence but by the will, helped by the gift God has infused into reason; and because there is no evidence, you go on thinking.
• The definition respects the nature of reason itself: reason naturally thinks about what it does not see; if you did not think about what you assent to, you would not be respecting reason. Anselm’s definition of theology starts here: belief seeking understanding. He quotes Hilary: I know I shall never arrive, but I keep on making progress. Aside: this is why people read the Catechism of the Catholic Church.
• A student asks him to repeat the first example, and he restates the doubting mind.

6. Truth in composite things (“it is not because we think truly that you are white”) #

• The text: he thinks truly who thinks the divided to be divided and the put-together to be put together; falsely who is in the contrary state. (He notes the text as he has it seems incomplete: “There should be more of there.”)
• The crucial line: it is not because we think truly that you are white that you are white, but because you are white we who say this speak truly.
• He is thinking first of material things, where there is a real composition of matter and form, or of substance and accident. Put together in your mind what is together in reality, divide what is divided, and you speak truly; do the reverse and you speak falsely.
• Recall from the treatment of before and after (cause and effect) and the Categories: while you are sitting, it is true to say you are sitting — the two are together in time, yet one is in some sense before the other as its cause.

7. Always, never, sometimes together (“some things are always together”) #

Threefold distinction from the text:

1. Always put together, unable to be divided: man and animal.
2. Always divided, unable to be put together: man and stone.
3. Contingent: sometimes together, sometimes not.

• On contingents, the same opinion and the same thought becomes now false, now true: “breakfast is sitting” [ed.: apparently a name, ASR uncertain] is sometimes true and sometimes false. About necessary things the same is always true or always false: man is an animal is always true, man is a stone always false.
• Question he puts: are contingent truths as true as necessary ones? Answer from Book Two: necessary things are more true; and this was why the consideration of truth belongs more to looking philosophy [ed.: speculative] than to practical knowledge — practical knowledge is largely about contingents, and its end is action, not truth.
• Examples of practical contingent truths: where is Zarqawi, who keeps changing his address; where to buy cheap and sell dear — the wine market, where a lesser country (Chile, Australia, Eastern Europe recovering from the communist days) sells cheap until it is established and prices rise, so you move on; when to buy and sell stock.

8. Truth in simple things (“about things not put together”) #

The question: in things not composed of matter and form — the separated substances, and still more God — what can truth mean, since there is nothing to compose or divide?

• The text: about things not put together, what is it to be or not to be, and true and false? It is not composite so as to be when put together and not be when divided (as “the wood is white” or “the diameter is incommensurable”). Neither will true and false belong in the same way; just as “true” is not the same in these, neither is “to be.”
• Book Two on the connection of being and truth, with his own expansion of the propter quod unumquodque tale, illud magis [ed.: the brief maxim; he calls this “the brevity of wisdom”]: when the same belongs to two things, but to one because of the other, it belongs more to the cause. So if truth belongs to effect because of cause, the cause is more true; if being belongs to effect because of cause, the cause more fully is. The order in being and the order in truth is the same.
• Aside: Hilary of Poitiers first picked up the Bible and was struck by “I am who am” in Exodus. If Aristotle had seen “I am who am” and then in the New Testament “I am truth itself,” he would say that makes sense — a motive of credibility for a philosopher.
• So simple things have more being, are more necessary, not contingent, and therefore have more truth; truth is tied up with act more than with ability.

9. In simple things truth is to grasp, error is impossible (“nor is there deception, but ignorance”) #

• The text: to grasp or understand and say is true. Thomas and Aristotle’s parenthesis warn: “say” here does not mean affirmation, where you say one thing of another; it means simply to understand what something is.
• This is how we eventually find that God understands: God understands by knowing what He Himself is, and thereby knows everything else, being the cause of everything else — understanding as we do in the first act.
• Contrast with our weakness: if in understanding what a triangle is I saw that its angles equal two right angles, I would not have to put them together; but my little mind does not see all that belongs to a triangle, so I must reason and then compose triangle with “has interior angles equal to two right angles.”
• “In case the very subtle Aristotle is saying here”: you are not deceived in understanding what something is except by happening [ed.: accidentally], insofar as there is some putting together, as when we form or state a definition. In simple understanding itself there is no possibility of mistake: either you understand or you do not, and to understand is to have truth.
• And these simple things all exist in act, not in ability — otherwise they would have come to be and ceased to be; but being itself does not come to be nor is corrupted, for it would have had to come from something. Is there in an angel an ability to be and not to be? Then they would be material. So they are always true in their nature.
• The two modes summarized from the text: for composites, if it is put together it is true, if not put together it is false; for simples, if it is a being it is thus. In the latter, truth is to understand them, the false is not to; there is no deception but ignorance.
• “And not as blindness — Thomas is very subtle.” Aristotle says blindness would be wholly lacking the ability to understand; so man is not wholly blind as to knowing what the angels are and what God is — otherwise he could never come to know them. “That’s comforting to know, right? Maybe we’ll see God someday as He is.” Aristotle is leaving it open here.
• Last point of the reading: there is no deception about unchangeable things, because they are not in time. If we take the triangle as unchangeable, it would not be thought that sometimes it has two right angles and sometimes not, for then it would change.

10. Closing: philosophy into theology (“we’re not going to put away philosophy”) #

He lets Aristotle rest; that was a preliminary reading of Book Nine. We do not put philosophy away but use it in theology. Sometimes studying theology gives you a desire to go back to the philosophical works; sometimes you appreciate the need for them more when you see the use Thomas makes of them in theology; and sometimes Thomas himself, even in a theological work, goes back and recalls or develops philosophical points. He then asks whether they have looked at the other documents, and calls a break.

His words #

• “eleventh reading” — his division of Book Nine of the Metaphysics.
• “wisdom,” “sixth book of wisdom,” “Book Nine” — [ed.: Metaphysics].
• “ability” — [ed.: potency]; “act” opposed to it.
• “figures of predicates,” “ten sit-ups,” “predicamenta” — [ed.: the ten categories].
• “simple grasping,” “understanding what a thing is” — the first act of reason [ed.: simple apprehension].
• “composing and dividing,” “understanding the true or the false” — the second act.
• scientia judicandi — the science of judging, i.e. the Prior and Posterior Analytics; judgment as certitude.
• assentire cum cogitatione — Augustine: to assent while thinking about it; his definition of belief.
• nous / intellectus / “natural understanding” — the assent to the obvious.
• “looking philosophy” — [ed.: speculative/theoretical philosophy], opposed to practical.
• propter quod unumquodque tale, illud magis — “on account of which more so”; his expansion: when the same belongs to two things but to one because of the other, it belongs more to the cause. He calls the compressed form “the brevity of wisdom.”
• ubique — everywhere; the question attached to God’s infinity.

Texts #

Read in class

• Aristotle, Metaphysics IX, eleventh reading (his handout, p. 13) — read and commented line by line: being according to the figures of predicates; truth as composing/dividing; always/never/sometimes together; things not put together; “to grasp and say is true”; ignorance not blindness; no deception about unchangeable things.
• Thomas Aquinas, commentary on the same passage — his remark on “say” not meaning affirmation, and on “not as blindness.”

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Metaphysics VI (good and bad in things, true and false in the mind); Metaphysics II (being and truth; necessary more true than contingent).
• Aristotle, De Anima III (composition and division); Categories; Peri Hermeneias (suspicion vs. opinion); Prior and Posterior Analytics.
• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I, order of questions on God’s substance and operations; ST II-II on the act of faith; De Veritate; Commentary on the Sentences; commentary on Hebrews.
• Augustine, On the Predestination of the Saints, ch. 2.
• Anselm (belief seeking understanding); Hilary of Poitiers (twice: “I am who am”; never arriving but making progress).
• Plato, Republic and Symposium (the good itself, the beautiful itself).
• Euclid, Elements I (forty-eight theorems); Exodus, “I am who am”; Catechism of the Catholic Church.

His questions #

• Why does Thomas take up God’s goodness with his perfection, but God’s truth only after his understanding? Because good and bad are chiefly in things, while true and false are primarily in the mind (Book Six).
• Why can there be the same knowledge of opposites but not the same love of opposites? Knowing brings the thing into the mind, where one opposite illuminates the other; love goes out to the thing, and in things one opposite excludes the other.
• What are the first two acts of reason? Apprehension (grasping what a thing is) and composition and division.
• Why does Thomas say “composing and dividing” rather than “judging”? Because the logic of the second act does not treat judgment but what a statement is; judgment belongs to the Analytics, since for the most part it results from reasoning.
• What is it to believe? To assent while thinking about it — assent moved by the will, not by evidence, and so distinct from the assent of natural understanding and of demonstration.
• Are contingent truths as true as necessary truths? No — necessary things are more true, which is why the consideration of truth belongs more to looking philosophy than to practical knowledge.
• In simple things, not composed of matter and form, what does truth mean? To understand what the thing is and say it — not a statement; and there is no deception in this, only ignorance.
• Can man come to know what the angels and God are? Not blindness but ignorance — so man is not wholly lacking the ability; Aristotle leaves it open.