Summa I, Q.17, a.3: Whether Falsehood Is in the Understanding; Natural vs. Reasoned-Out Understanding; the Four Kinds of Opposition

Orientation #

He says “I guess we’re up to Article Three of Question Seventeen,” and refers back to “the previous article” for sight not being deceived about its own sensible (prev. lecture). At the end he stops for a break before looking further at how true and false are opposed. The previous class covered ST I q.17 aa.1-2 on falsity in things and in the senses; the next continues q.17 a.4 and opens q.18.

The class, in order #

1. Article 3: the objections and an equivocation on “understanding” (“up to Article Three of Question Seventeen”) #

He reads the two objections: (1) Augustine, Eighty-three Questions: everyone who is deceived does not understand, and the false is in knowledge insofar as we are deceived; (2) Aristotle, On the Soul III: the understanding is always correct. He flags at once that intellectus in Latin, like nous in Greek, sometimes means the ability to understand and sometimes one of the habits (what he calls “natural understanding” as opposed to “reasoned understanding”), so “there’s an equivocation there in the two meanings of the word.” Sed contra: On the Soul III, where there is a putting together of things understood (affirmation, negation, statement) there is true and false; this takes place in the understanding.

• Aside: opening prayer; joke about not being like Ajax telling his guardian angel to go help someone else; stories of Thomas praying on the ground until all became clear.

2. The body: likeness, form, and where a power can fall away (“just as a thing has its existence through its own form”) #

Point: as a thing exists through its form, a knowing power knows through the likeness of the thing known; it does not fail about what the likeness is of, but can fail about what follows or happens to it.

1. When I receive my soul (form) I begin to be a man; when the knowing power receives the likeness of the thing, it begins to know.
2. A natural thing does not fall away from the existence that belongs to its form but can fall away in what follows upon it: a man has two feet, but if a foot is cut off (“How’s your foot? Why, I cut it off yesterday”) he does not thereby cease to be a man.
3. So the sense is not deceived about its own sensible but about the common sensibles (optical illusions: the quantity of things) and the accidental sensibles: the boyhood trick of a piece of metal shaped like a spilled ink-blot on mother’s white tablecloth—she sees the colour that is really there, and is deceived about the accidental sensible (metal, not ink).
4. As sense is informed by its proper sensibles, the understanding is informed by the likeness of the quidditas (from quid, “what it is”) of the thing; about the what it is, the understanding is not deceived—“Thomas is going to later on kind of qualify what he just said.”

• Aristotle is more precise in On the Soul III: reason’s own object is what-it-is of something sensed or imagined. Hence the earlier problem of abstract and concrete names for God: no distinction in God between being good and goodness, whereas between you and your justice or your geometry there is a real distinction.

3. Composition and division; falsehood mixed into a definition (“But in putting together or dividing”) #

Point: the understanding can be deceived in its second act (affirmation = putting together, negation = dividing) and, per accidens, in the first act when composition is mixed in.

• Second act: I understand what a man is and what a dog is, then divide (“man is not a dog”); understand man and animal, then compose (“man is an animal”); “you start doing that, you can get into trouble.” Deception happens when it attributes to the thing something that does not follow on the what-it-is or is opposed to it—here the understanding is like sense judging common sensibles, or “my mother about the accidental sensibles.”
• A difference from sense: falsity is in the understanding not only because its knowledge is false but because the understanding knows falsity as it knows truth (I know it is true that 2 is half of 4 and false that 2 is half of 3); in sense, falsity is not something known.
• Per accidens falsity in knowing what-it-is, in two ways: (a) attributing the definition of one thing to another (the definition of circle to man)—the definition is false about the other thing; (b) putting together parts that cannot go together—“four-footed rational animal”—false in itself, because the understanding is false in forming “some rational animal is four-footed.” (Aside: the old paradox of what begins life on four, then two, then three; plants have their mouth in the ground, animals a little above, man should look up to the stars.)
• In knowing a simple what-it-is there is no false understanding: either true or one understands nothing at all. “Either you know what God is, or you don’t.” If I really knew what my angel was I couldn’t be mistaken.
• Aside: Chesterton on marriage as “the great quadruplet.”

4. Reply to Augustine: when you really understand, you can’t be mistaken (“it’s impossible for you to make a mistake”) #

Thomas: since what-it-is is the proper object, we are properly said to understand when reducing something to its what-it-is and judging from it, as in demonstrations (a syllogism making us know the cause, which cannot be otherwise, based on a true definition); so Augustine is right in that sense, not that no operation of the understanding can be deceived. His own argument for the truth in Augustine:

1. To make a mistake is to think something is other than what it is (a dog is a cat; an odd number is even).
2. If I understand what a dog is and what a cat is, I understand their difference; if I didn’t, what I’d be understanding is something more universal (animal), and “an animal is an animal” is no falsehood.
3. Clearer case: if by odd and even one understands only what they have in common, “an odd number is an even number” says only “a number is a number”—nothing more true than that, “as the great Boethius says.” If one understands odd as not divisible into two equal parts and even as divisible, how can he think one is the other? Only if he doesn’t understand.

• Examples: the witches’ “fair is foul, and foul is fair”—how can men be deceived into thinking good bad? He calls a car and a computer both “machine” without being mistaken. He could mistake Cabernet Sauvignon for Pinot Noir—“but do I really understand what I’m drinking then?”
• The witches’ “hover through the fog and filthy air” touch the two causes of deception: the mind confused (fog) and the appetite corrupted (filthy air), in the context of human action; either or both can deceive you, but never the mind that understands—there is some failure to understand.

5. Reply to Aristotle: nous, episteme, and natural understanding (“reasoning is to understanding as motion is to rest”) #

Point: “the understanding is always correct” is said of intellectus as the habit of principles, not the ability.

• Both nous and intellectus name the ability to understand and also the fundamental habit of the mind, which he calls natural understanding.
• His “proportion of weightiness”: reasoning : understanding :: motion : rest. Reasoning goes from one thing to another (why Shakespeare used “discourse” in defining reason); “understanding” etymologically is standing still.
• As there is rest before and after motion (he demonstrates by standing still, moving, standing still), is there understanding before reasoning as well as after? Often we think something out before we understand it, and sometimes think and still don’t understand—so it is not just that understanding follows reasoning.
• Understanding after reasoning: Plato and Aristotle’s episteme, from the Greek for coming to a halt; Latin scientia lacks the etymology; no single English word, so he renders it “reasoned-out understanding” (a speech rather than a name).
• Argument for understanding before reasoning: if reason understood nothing before it began to reason, there would be nothing to reason from. Aristotle calls it simply nous, Thomas intellectus; he calls it “natural understanding”: what we come to understand naturally rather than reason out. It is hidden at first because people are more aware of the process of thinking something out.
• That is why in Nicomachean Ethics VI Aristotle takes up first the three better-known virtues of reason—episteme (geometry), art (right reason about making: cooking, carpentry), foresight/prudence (Churchill, George Washington)—and only then the two about beginnings: nous, about the beginnings of our knowledge (the axioms and their parts), and wisdom (sophia), about the beginning of all things.
• Thomas’s reply: the understanding is always correct in the understanding of the beginnings, about which one is not deceived for the same reason as about what-it-is: the principles are known at once when their parts are known, because the predicate is posited in the definition of the subject. Examples: know whole and part, and it is obvious the whole is more than a part; know before and after, and nothing is before or after itself; nothing is the beginning of itself. “Do good and avoid evil”—the foundation of ethics as of episteme. Aristotle in the Ethics: the man who doesn’t think he should honour his father and mother needs not an argument but punishment.
• Aside: he just read another biography of Churchill while in England.

6. Article 4 opened: opposition, material vs. formal distinction (“This is about the opposition of true and false”) #

Point: knowing the kinds of opposition is “very important in philosophy and our thinking.” He recalls the earlier question whether one and many are opposed, and being vs. non-being from “I am who am.”

• Aristotle treats the kinds of opposites explicitly in two places, the Categories and Metaphysics V, each time right before before-and-after; the juxtaposition “is not by chance.”
• Material distinction vs. formal distinction: material distinction is based on the continuous—part outside of part. The two end-points of a line differ not in kind but by position in the continuum, as do the students round the table or many chairs of the same kind (wood is continuous, can be cut up). Formal distinction is based on opposites and is more a difference in kind.
• Why it matters: Father, Son and Holy Spirit are really distinct; not by material distinction, since God is altogether simple, no body—so by formal distinction, and then the question is which opposites.

7. The four kinds of opposites (“contradiction, lack and having, contraries, and then relatives”) #

Point: Aristotle’s four kinds, in order of decreasing opposition; Thomas eliminates three as the basis of the distinction of the Persons and is left with relatives.

• Relatives: Aristotle’s Greek is pros ti, Latin ad aliquid, “towards something”—I am teacher towards you, you student towards me; shorter or taller. John’s Gospel: en arche en ho logos, and the Word was towards God—“confirmation of this,” though Thomas arrives at it by argument (elimination).
• Contradiction, the greatest opposition, being vs. non-being; two famous axioms: impossible to be and not be (made precise: at the same time, the same way), and one must either be or not be. He plays Hamlet: “to be or not to be” is a question because you can’t be both and must be one; “to eat or to breathe” is not, since you can and should do both. Strictly, everything is one or the other: chair or not chair, dog or not dog, God or not God, sinner or not.
• Lack (Latin privation) and having: less opposed because they share a common subject; the lack implies the thing is by nature apt to have and should have (blind vs. sight). Boundary case: the chair does not see but is not blind—only those apt to have sight are either sighted or blind.
• Contraries: forms or species furthest apart in the same genus; one is not simply the lack of the other, though (Aristotle, “in many places”) one tends to be lacking compared with the other. Vice is not the lack of virtue but a real habit inclining to the bad: hence easier to make a just man from a boy than from a criminal out of jail, easier to raise a girl chaste (reading Jane Austen) than to make a chaste woman of a Paris prostitute who keeps falling back. Blindness and sight share only a subject; virtue and vice share subject (the will) and genus (having). Contrariety is diversity of form/species—St Paul’s “form of God,” “form of a slave,” where form means nature as Aristotle explains—so it cannot distinguish Father and Son, who have one nature; nor can being/non-being or lack/having, since both are God.
• Relatives, least opposed: common genus, and one posits the other—no father without a son, no double without a half—whereas the other three tend to eliminate each other. So Thomas sometimes divides these three against that one, though Aristotle gives four straight off.
• Aside: he was once mistaken in thinking Bonaventure said baptism in a wrong order of the names is invalid; Bonaventure says it would not be, because the names themselves posit the order (unless the church has decided otherwise—he doesn’t know).

8. Which opposition for each of the most universal names? (“each of these most universals has an opposite”) #

Point: being, thing/something, one, true, good each have an opposite; the class asks which kind of opposition in each case.

• Being/non-being: obviously contradiction. Something/nothing: he recalls a text of Thomas, thinks it is more or less like being/non-being, no common subject. (Aside: as a boy wondering “what if there was nothing?—wouldn’t that be something?”)
• One/many: one adds “indivisible,” but not pure negation—one means undivided being. He turns back to ST I q.11 a.2 and reads: one is opposed to many diversi modo. The one that is the beginning of number (not the most universal meaning; confusing the two is behind Plato’s “all things are numbers”) is opposed to number as measure to measured (Metaphysics X). The one convertible with being (every being is one and everything one is a being) is opposed to multitude per modum privationis, undivided to divided—because we know the simple through the composed, the one through the many in a way. So being/non-being (and perhaps something/nothing) are opposed the first way, one/many the second.
• Good/bad: “gotta be careful there.” The first meaning of bad is a lack (Augustine: sin is nothing—but Augustine speaks less precisely than Thomas; bad is not non-being but not having what one is able to and should have). Second meaning: the thing having such a lack; third: what causes such a lack. Blindness is bad; hence it is bad to be a blind dog or man; hence bad for me to poke your eye. A bad human act is bad in the second sense, understood through the first: the lack is of the order or measure reason should give—drinking before operating on you or before lecturing, eating or drinking too much—and you are bad in the third sense if you led me into that excess.
• Closing: being/non-being one way, one/many another, “and now perhaps we’ll find out that true and false are another way.” Break; true/false left for after.
• Aside: Guinness sales falling off ten or twenty percent, not everyone drinking Irish beer for St Patrick’s Day; he never drank green beer.

His words #

• intellectus / nous: sometimes the ability to understand, sometimes a habit of the mind.
• natural understanding: the habit Aristotle calls nous, what we understand naturally without reasoning it out [ed.: intellectus principiorum].
• reasoned-out understanding: his rendering of episteme (from the Greek for coming to a halt); Latin scientia [ed.: science].
• proportion of weightiness: reasoning : understanding :: motion : rest.
• likeness: that by which a knowing power knows, as form is that by which a thing exists.
• quidditas, “the what it is”: the proper object of the understanding.
• private sensibles [ed.: proper sensibles]; common sensibles; accidental sensibles (per accidens).
• putting together / dividing: affirmation and negation, “composition and division,” the second act of reason.
• material distinction: based on the continuous, part outside part; formal distinction: based on opposites, a difference in kind.
• pros ti / ad aliquid, “towards something”: Aristotle’s name for relatives.
• lack: his English for privation; opposed to “having.”
• contraries: forms or species furthest apart in the same genus.
• convertible: every being is one and everything one is a being.
• diversi modo; per modum privationis.
• foresight: his rendering of prudence.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, ST I q.17 a.3: objections, sed contra, body, replies to obj. 1 and 2.
• Thomas Aquinas, ST I q.11 a.2, body (one opposed to many in diverse ways).
• Handout “Shakespeare on Error,” p. 3: Macbeth witches (“fair is foul… fog and filthy air”); Hamlet, “to be or not to be.”

Mentioned

• Thomas Aquinas, ST I q.17 a.4 (announced: the opposition of true and false).
• Augustine, Eighty-three Questions (obj. 1); Augustine on sin as nothing.
• Aristotle, On the Soul III (understanding always correct; composition of things understood; object of reason is what-it-is of something sensed or imagined).
• Aristotle, Categories (opposites; relatives; before and after); Metaphysics V (opposites, before and after); Metaphysics X (one as measure, in Thomas’s text).
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics VI (virtues of reason); the Ethics on honouring parents.
• St John’s Gospel, opening; St Paul, “form of God… form of a slave.”
• Boethius (“nothing more true than that a number is a number”).
• Chesterton on marriage; Bonaventure on the order of names in baptism; Jane Austen; a Churchill biography.

His questions #

• Is mother deceived by the colour of the fake ink-blot? No; she sees the colour there, and is deceived about the accidental sensible (metal, not ink).
• Could someone really make the mistake of thinking a dog is a cat, or an odd number even? Only if he doesn’t understand them; if he understands both he understands their difference, and if he understands only what they share he says “animal is animal,” “number is number,” which is true.
• Do I really understand what I’m drinking if I take Cabernet Sauvignon for Pinot Noir? No—which shows the truth in Augustine’s saying.
• Is there an understanding before reasoning, as there is one after? Yes: if reason understood nothing before it reasoned there would be nothing to reason from.
• Are the divine Persons distinguished by material or formal distinction, and by which opposites? Formal, since God is simple; by elimination of contradiction, lack/having and contrariety, by relatives (John: the Word was towards God).
• Is the chair blind? No; it does not see, but only what is apt by nature to see is blind.
• Is vice really just the lack of virtue? No; it is a real habit and inclination, which is why the criminal resists more than the boy.
• What does “one” add to being, and how are one and many opposed? “Undivided”; per modum privationis, the undivided to the divided (q.11 a.2).
• What is the lack that makes a bad human act bad? The lack of the order or measure reason should give: an unreasonable act.
• How are true and false opposed? Left open—“perhaps we’ll find out” after the break.