Summa I q.16 a.1–3: Same Knowledge of Opposites, Truth in Judgment, and Truth Convertible with Being

Orientation #

He is finishing the body of article 1 begun last time (prev. lecture), and points back to question 6 (goodness of God) and question 5, article 3 (good convertible with being) “as we did before”; he looks ahead to question 19 (will of God) and to the Trinity “if we get that far”. The previous class worked through the prologue and article 1 of question 16; the next takes articles 4–5.

The class, in order #

1. Knowing takes, love gives (“truth is primarily in the mind, and good is primarily in things”) #

Point: the body of a.1 makes the philosopher’s contrast (sixth book of wisdom) that truth is chiefly in the mind and good chiefly in things, and knowing is perfected by getting the known into the understanding.

• Language shows it: we say “grasp”, “get a hold of”, “take” for understanding — to define a square you take the genus (quadrilateral) and take the differences (equilateral, right-angled) and put them together. Love’s words are “give your heart”, “lose your heart” (“I left my heart in San Francisco”; Romeo: can I go when my heart is here). Your heart is said to be in what you love.
• Consequence: the saints in this life love God more perfectly than they know Him — knowing tries to get God into a mind that cannot hold Him; love goes out into God. Metaphor: easier to jump into the ocean than to get the ocean inside you. So the will is more adequate to God in this life than reason (different, maybe, in the vision, which needs the light of glory).
• Aside: losing your mind is always bad; losing your heart is bad or not depending on to whom.
• Shakespeare: “my mind is played the painter” — knowing is making a painting of you inside my head; without your colour and shape in me I cannot remember or know you.

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

Point: the strongest way to see the contrast (Plato and Aristotle) is that one knowledge is of both opposites, but love of one opposite excludes love of the other, because in things one opposite excludes the other.

1. Same knowledge of opposites: the doctor who knows normal blood pressure knows high; you cannot know an overactive or underactive thyroid (the “atomic cocktail” that slows it, then remedies to bring it up) without knowing the normal; overweight/underweight need the correct weight (thin women, concentration-camp survivors, his high-school friend from missionary school with a spastic stomach being “built up” with bowls of ice cream). “Abnormal” has “normal” in its very definition; too much salt in the soup means I know the right amount.
2. Student in California: “we shouldn’t teach ethics, you learn vice too” — but there are not two ethics; you can’t know cowardice without courage. Grammar: “You am my students, and I use your professor” — he knows it is wrong because he knows how to speak correctly. Socrates at the end of the Symposium to Agathon (tragedy) and Aristophanes (comedy): if you knew what you were doing you could write both. Aristotle’s Rhetoric shows how to arouse anger and cool it. One medical art of health and sickness; logic of correct and incorrect reasoning; Mozart’s Musical Joke teaches how not to write music; he as logician knows how to build a bad argument that looks good.
3. Not the same love: if I love health I cannot love sickness; love of courage eliminates love of cowardice; love of justice is incompatible with love of injustice — though knowing justice helps knowing injustice.
4. How things are: normal and high blood pressure, sight and blindness, beauty and ugliness cannot be in the body together. Conclusion: love follows the way things are (goes out to things, where opposites exclude); knowing brings the thing into the mind, where both opposites can be together. So truth is primarily in the mind, only secondarily in things by comparison to a mind; for good it is the reverse — love is good because the thing loved is good (love of wisdom good because wisdom is good; love of injustice bad because injustice is bad).

3. Why goodness comes with the substance and truth with the knowledge of God (“very careful the way Thomas writes”) #

Point: the order of the Summa follows a.1. Goodness of God is treated in q.6 with the divine substance (the substance is a thing, and good is primarily in things), before the will of God (q.19); truth is treated here, attached to the divine knowledge. God primarily loves his own goodness and shares it. Thomas gives some reasons for his order, not every one; this one you can see from a.1. Break.

4. Article 2: truth in composing and dividing (“only in the second act of reason”) #

Point: truth properly is in the second act of reason (affirming/denying), not in sense or in understanding what a thing is.

• Background as he gives it: first act = understanding what something is; second = putting together (affirmative) or dividing (negative statement); Aristotle (sixth book of wisdom, third book about the soul) puts truth in the second; in logic the statement is speech signifying the true or the false, the definition speech signifying what a thing is.
• Obj. 1: On the Soul III — as sense of its own sensibles is always true, so understanding of what it is; neither composes. Obj. 2: Isaac, book on definition: truth is equality of thing and understanding; incomplex understanding and sense can be equal to things. Sed contra: sixth book of wisdom — in simple things and the what-it-is, truth is neither in the understanding nor in things.
• Body: since each thing is true as having its own form, the understanding is true as having the likeness of the thing known; truth is defined by that conformity, so to know this conformity is to know truth. Sense has a likeness but does not consider the comparison; understanding can know its conformity, but not in knowing what a thing is — only when it judges the thing to be as the form it apprehends, i.e. in composing and dividing: every statement applies the predicate’s form to the subject or removes it (“man is an animal”: animal belongs to man; “man is not a stone”).
• Class test: “man” — “stone” — true or false? No; “man is an animal”, “man is a stone” — yes. Strictly, not only “unicorn” but “man” and “stone” are neither true nor false.
• So sense and simple understanding are true as a certain true thing, not as the known in the knower, which the name “true” implies (the perfection of understanding is the true as known). Thus the two objections are solved. He calls this “a subtle thing”: to be conformed is not to know or say that one is conformed.

5. Five kinds of sentence, and the statement (“speech signifying the true or the false”) #

Point: in grammar five sentences — statement (declarative), question, command, prayer/request, exhortation — but only the statement is true or false.

• Command to the will of an inferior (“shut the door”, “shut your mouth”); prayer to a superior (“give us this day our daily bread”, “help me”); exhortation to an equal (“let’s go to the movies”); question (“what time is it?”, “what’s your name?”). None true or false — “shut the door” may presuppose falsely that the door is open, but by itself is neither; “I am in need of help” is true or false, “help me” is not.
• Thomas says propositio, originally the premise of a syllogism, later used for statement. The logician cares chiefly about the statement (commands, prayers, exhortations are for action; questions somewhat); Aristotle’s second logical book, Peri Hermeneias, is really about the statement. Historians call Aristotle father of logic; Thomas calls him “the philosopher”.
• Aside: a student’s name, Isidore — one of the Doctors, Isidore of Seville.

6. Article 3: what convertible means; the most universal words (“every A is a B, and every B is a what A”) #

Point: setting up whether true and being are convertible.

• Convertible: every A is B and every B is A. Most universal: being (ens, named from “to be”; opposite: non-being); thing/something (named from what a thing is; opposite: nothing — almost the same as non-being); one: undivided in itself and distinct from others — everything is either simple (undivided) or composed (exists only if put together, so undivided), and nothing is without being distinct. Thomas has treated being, thing, one; now the harder case: true, and later good.
• Obj. 1: true is properly in understanding, being in things (“a pretty good objection”). Obj. 2: true extends to non-being too (it is true that what is not is not), so true is more universal than being. Obj. 3: what stand as before and after are not convertible (odd number → number, not conversely), and true seems before being since being is understood only under the notion of true.
• Sed contra: the philosopher, “second book of wisdom” — the same is the disposition of things in being and in truth. Aside on the title: Metaphysica, “after the books of natural philosophy”, from Andronicus of Rhodes; Aristotle calls it sophia, wisdom. For Christians: He who says “I am who am” says “I am truth” — a motive of credibility Aristotle (d. 322 BC) never met.
• Body: as good has the notion of desirable, true has an order to knowledge; each thing, insofar as it has being, is knowable — hence On the Soul III, the soul is in some way all things (by sense and understanding). So as good is convertible with being (q.5 a.3), so is true. Good adds “desirable” to being; true adds a comparison to the understanding — being as knowable.

7. Reply 1: true in things and in mind; the mind open to everything (“the mind is open to knowing what everything”) #

Point: true is in things (convertible with being secundum substantiam) and in the understanding (convertible as making known with the thing made known); being too is in things and in the mind, though true chiefly in the mind and being chiefly in things — they differ in definition.

• Anaxagoras, first to speak of mind: the first thing he says is that it is infinite/unlimited (a student offers “purest of all things”, “one”). Even our weakest understanding is open to all things.

1. To say “I don’t know everything” I must know what “everything” means. 2. To understand “you can’t get something from nothing” (as to understand “man is not a stone” I must understand man and stone) I must understand both something and nothing. 3. Everything is something. So, in an extremely confused way, you know everything — you know something about everything (that it is something, that it has being). The mind moves from this confused knowledge to distinct. (Bright student: “I’ll tell my dad I know everything, Professor Berquist said so.”)

• The usual way: the universal. Knowing number is knowing an infinity; “no odd number is even”, “no prime number is composite” are statements about infinitely many; “man is an animal” about all men past, present, future. Shakespeare’s “large discourse” for reason: discourse about the universal. So the mind can make known everything; being and knowable are equally universal.

8. Reply 2: non-being, beings of reason (“nothing is something in the mind”) #

Point: non-being is knowable only insofar as the understanding makes it knowable, so the true is founded on being — non-being is a being of reason.

• The objection sharpened: “nothing is more true than when you say something is itself” (a dog is a dog); it is equally true that non-being is non-being; so isn’t knowable more universal than being?
• Solution from the fifth book of wisdom: Aristotle’s senses of being — by the figures of predication (substance, quantity, quality…), by act and ability, and being according to the truth of a statement, which includes beings of reason. “Nothing is nothing”: nothing in the world, something in the mind. “He is blind”, “he is ignorant”: affirmative statements, though to be blind is really not to be; the mind takes it as if a kind of something. The sophist who asks “how can nothing be something?” confuses the being in things with the being in reason; the contradiction disappears since we do not say nothing is something in things. Ignorance in me is really an absence, but reason takes it as something to talk about. In that sense to be in the mind is more universal than to be in things.
• ens rationis, two kinds: negations (nothing, blindness) and some relations that are only of reason (real relations vs relations of reason; God’s relation to creatures is not real, the creature’s to God is real) — “very subtle”.
• Asides: Professor Kerserk [name uncertain in recording]: philosophy is the only subject where you’re paid to talk about nothing; the little boy thinking “what if there was nothing?” — there would be nothing around to know it.

9. Reply 3: being before true (“being falls in the definition of true”) #

Point: “being cannot be grasped without knowledge of true” is true if it means the notion of true follows on grasping being; false if it means being cannot be grasped unless true is grasped. True cannot be grasped without being, since being falls in its definition. Likewise being cannot be understood without being understandable, yet can be understood without its understandability being understood: what is understood is true, but not “an understanding being is true understood”. Parmenides could not understand how a thing is knowable (thought it must be in the knower as in itself, whereas it is there immaterially) — he didn’t know its knowability, yet couldn’t know it without its being knowable. Admire Aristotle in the fifth book of wisdom, first to understand “being” fully — the “is” of “I am” vs of “nothing is nothing”. So true and being are convertible.

10. Words for nothing; hypostasis and substantia (“there’s poison in another’s word”) #

Aside: Greek ouden = “not one”, English “nothing” = “no thing” — both one and thing are most universal; oddity that “someone” means a person though a chair in a room is one thing. Latin substantia and Greek hypostasis are etymologically the same (stand under); hypostasis came to mean nearly person (any individual substance of rational nature), but substantia can mean nature, so “three hypostases” translated as “three substances” says three natures — Jerome: there is poison in another’s word. Hence we say three persons; more on the Trinity if the course gets that far.

His words #

• sixth book of wisdom — Aristotle’s Metaphysics VI [ed.: Metaphysics]; “second/fifth book of wisdom” likewise; Aristotle calls the work sophia
• grasp / take vs. give — words of knowing vs. words of loving
• same knowledge of opposites — one knowledge of both contraries; not the same love of opposites
• first act / second act of reason — understanding what a thing is; putting together and dividing
• statement — speech signifying the true or the false; definition — speech signifying what a thing is; propositio — Thomas’s word, originally a premise
• command, prayer, exhortation, question — sentences that are neither true nor false
• convertible — every A is B and every B is A
• being (ens) — what is; something/thing; one — undivided and distinct
• secundum substantiam — how true in things is convertible with being
• being according to the truth of a statement — Aristotle’s sense covering ens rationis, being of reason: negations and relations of reason
• large discourse — Shakespeare’s mark of reason, discourse about the universal
• ouden — Greek “nothing”, “not one”; hypostasis / substantia — “stand under”

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 16, a. 1 (end of body)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 16, a. 2 (objections, sed contra, body)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 16, a. 3 (objections, sed contra, body, replies 1–3)

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Metaphysics VI, II, V; On the Soul III; Rhetoric; Peri Hermeneias
• Plato, Symposium (end)
• Isaac, book on definitions (cited in obj. 2 of a.2)
• Summa Theologiae I, q. 5, a. 3; q. 6; q. 19
• Shakespeare (painter line; “large discourse”; Romeo); Mozart, A Musical Joke; Anaxagoras; Parmenides; Andronicus of Rhodes; Jerome; Exodus “I am who am” / “I am truth” (inferred loci not given)

His questions #

• Are “grasp” and “take” the words we use for love? No — for love we say give, give your heart, lose your heart.
• Could you know what abnormal blood pressure is without knowing what normal is? No; normal is in the very definition of abnormal.
• Is there the same love of opposites? No; love of one opposite excludes love of the other, because in things one excludes the other.
• Why does Thomas treat goodness with the divine substance but truth with the divine knowledge? Good is primarily in things and the divine substance is a thing; truth is primarily in the mind.
• “Man” — “stone”: true or false? Neither; only “man is an animal” / “man is a stone” is true or false.
• “Shut the door” — true or false? Neither; commands, prayers, exhortations, questions are not true or false, only the statement is.
• What is the very first thing Anaxagoras said about the mind? That it is infinite, unlimited.
• Is nothing something? Nothing in the world, something in the mind — a being of reason.
• Is to be blind really to be, or not to be? Not to be; the mind takes it as if it were a kind of something.