De Anima (On the Soul)
3. Why Knowing the Soul Is Hard: How Natural Science Reasons, and the Phaedo's Two Views of the Soul
https://berquistcourse.com/course/philosophy/4-de-anima/003-why-knowing-the-soul-is-hard-how-natural-science-reasons/

[0:00] Okay. Now let me just stop on that for a moment here and a couple other texts here which I just got in Latin here, but I'll leave them with you and you can reproduce them if you wanted to.

[0:27] The first one here is read upon something else that I was going to bring out here next, but it's taken from the Summa Contra Gentiles, the third book here, chapter fifty six. But I've got the the title here.

[0:47] He says, "No knowing power knows anything except by reason of its own object, its own proper object. For we do not know by sight something except in so far as it is what colored, right?

[1:07] But the understanding's own object is the what it is, as the substance of a thing, as is said in the third book about the soul. We'll see that when we get to the third book, right? That the our reason's own object is the what it is of something we sense or imagine, huh?

[1:30] Therefore, whatever the understanding knows about something, it knows through a knowledge of the substance of that thing, what that thing is. Whence, in every demonstration, through which become known to us the proper accidents, right? I mean the properties, we take as a principle the what it is, as is said in the first book of Posterior Analytics. Now you're going to see that very clearly in geometry, right?

[2:01] Okay, it's through a knowledge of what right angle is, what triangle is, and so on, that we eventually come to know that a triangle has interior angles equal to right angles. Okay.

[2:16] If, however, he says, the substance of some thing, if, however, the understanding knows the substance of some things through accidents, as is said in the first book about the soul, let me come right up now, right next, where Aristotle says and he quotes Aristotle that the accidents confer a great part to a knowledge of what it is. This, he says, is per accidents. Okay. In so far as the knowledge of the understanding arises from the what senses, and thus through a knowledge of sensible accidents is necessary to arrive at a knowledge of the substance of what it is, on account of which this does not have place in mathematics, he says, but in actual things only.

[3:18] I know what he's saying there, yes, huh? And just take geometry, which is the first mathematical science. There, take plane geometry. Everything's on the plane, on the surface, right? Triangle, square, circle, right? So you can know directly, right, and kind of immediately, before anything else, what this is: triangle, circle, square, and so on. And you know the soul in that way? No, see. Okay. And it's because our knowledge starts with our what senses, right?

[3:52] The exterior thing, you know. We know color and sound and so on, and then we know our sensing color and sound, and then we know, you know, and work our way back, way to the to what the soul is. And that's the difference in a way between naturality, which, as he says, is in mathematics right?

[4:18] Okay maybe make an objection to that by saying that this—we know the soul—not only through our senses, but through inward experience, which is not just through our senses. So maybe we could start with knowledge. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you'll see with the Greeks, you know, the early Greeks there—they kind of confused the understanding in what senses, huh? And so you have to eventually distinguish the understanding or reason from the senses, huh?

[5:01] And you'll see him doing that in the beginning of the third book, right? Okay. You know the problem the moderns have, you know, with are you awake or you're asleep, right? You know, because imagining is like sensing, right? And in a a dream, you confuse imagining with sensing, don't you? Okay.

[5:27] So, but when you wake up again, you realize there's a difference between seeing something and imagining it, right? But we also confuse imagining with what thinking, huh? Imagine that's so. I think that's so, right?

[5:46] You know, saw Shakespeare, you know, in the when the chorus speaks there in Henry V, you know, he's trying to get your imagination to fill out what's on the stage, right? Sometimes they use the word thought, sometimes you use the word images. Like we do in daily life, we use these interchangeably, right? So Aristotle then has to distinguish between imagining and what thinking, right? And so only after he distinguishes between imagining and thinking that he begins to talk about that part of the soul by which it thinks and understands,

[6:23] huh? Okay. That's why we borrow words from the senses, huh? Do you grasp what I'm saying? Taken from the sense of touch, huh? Do you see what I mean? Taken from the eye, right?

[6:39] It's got no taste, no judgment. Senses are more known to us, right? Okay. And so we have to eventually what distinguish thinking from sensing, and that's not too hard to do, but thinking and imagining is more hard to do, right? Distinguish eventually image and thought, huh?

[7:08] Of course, you know the I think I mentioned how John Locke there he confuses image and thought, huh? Calls them interchangeably an idea, right? But the average person does that too, right? An idea? What do you mean? You're imagining something, or you have a thought? What's the difference? You know? You know? So you have to gradually separate thinking and thought from imagining and image, huh? And even that from sensing, huh?

[7:43] So we tend to start from the from the senses and gradually go towards the reason, right? That's why it resembles a bit what you do in wisdom, right? where you go towards the material, huh?

[7:59] Now, the other text I've got here is the one from the commentary of Thomas on Boethius's De Trinitate, huh? And Boethius, when he's contrasting the three sciences that we spoke about before, he says that natural philosophy proceeds. rationabiliter. And mathematics, he says, proceeds disciplinabiliter. And wisdom, he says, proceeds or metaphysics proceeds intellectualiter Natural philosophy proceeds rationabiliter mathematics disciplinabiliter and wisdom intellectualiter. But Thomas has a whole article each one of these words, okay?

[9:07] And I'm not going to go into all of that, but we try to explain what it means to say that natural philosophy proceeds rationabiliter Well, Thomas says there's three meanings to proceeding rationabiliter Okay, and one meaning he says is that you proceed from something of reason, that we study in logic, say, like genus and species and difference and so on. Another way we speak of proceeding rationabiliter there, when something is what reasonable but not known for sure.

[9:47] Okay, so you're still thinking about it, but you haven't quite come to a thing. The third meaning rationabiliter is that you're proceeding in the way that is characteristic of ratio or reason, right? Okay, and that's the way in which natural philosophy proceeds rationabiliter. Okay, and the text I just reproduced here is the third way.

[10:15] In a third way, a proceeding is called rational from the rational power, in so far as in proceeding we follow the proper way of the rational soul in knowing. And in this way, a rational process is proper to natural science. Now he says natural science, in its proceeding, serves the rational soul's own way in regard to two things. First, in regard to this, that just as a rational soul, from sensible things, right, which are more known to us, gets a knowledge of understandable things which are more known by nature, so also natural science proceeds from those things which are more known to us and less known by nature, as is clear in the first book of the physics.

[11:14] For the demonstration, which is by a sign, and sign is always something sensible, its first meaning, or through an effect is more used in what natural science.

[11:28] And secondly, he says. Because since it belongs to reason to discourse from one thing to another, this is observed more in natural science, where from a knowledge of one thing one comes to a knowledge of another thing, just as from the knowledge of the effect to a knowledge of the cause. And one proceeds not only from one thing to another by reason, where one thing is not another thing, as one proceeds, say, from animal to man.

[12:05] Okay. But in natural science, in which there is a demonstration by extrinsic causes, one proves one thing to another entirely outside of it. And this rational mode in natural science is most of all observed, and therefore natural science, among others, is more conform to the understanding of man. One attributes this to natural science, not because it belongs to it alone, but because it most of all does this.

[12:35] Okay. We can talk about that some more. Link. He's saying that in natural science, one observes what is characteristic of our reason most of all, which is to learn from the senses, right,

[12:55] and to learn by going from one thing to another, right. And you can expand upon both of those, right? Now you call in Shakespeare's definition of reason. He put the word discourse in, right? That's the second thing that Thomas talks about there. But in discourse, not just from this to that in the mind, but from one thing to another thing. Okay. Now Thomas sometimes, in other passages, he distinguishes

[13:32] four ways in which reason goes from one thing to another. Sometimes from the cause to the effect, but more often from the effect to the cause, and from like to like, right, and from opposite to opposite, right. But this is observed most of all, he says, in natural philosophy, from one thing to another, right? Okay. Now, say those things we could discuss you know some length, you know.

[13:58] Now, first up, Leval there on C D on the lecture notes text there, you know, point to all of this, huh? Okay. And we can get a whole course on that. Okay. But that's very substantial. But I'm just mentioning those things because you'll see this very much in the study of the soul, right? Okay. That we start from the outward right and go inward in studying the soul from the sensible.

[14:28] Going inward, but likewise, we go from one thing to another, right? And this is very much true when you know the what. What does discourse mean? It means to know one thing from another, right? Well, you know the acts through their objects, right? You know the powers through their acts, and you know the soul through its what powers, right?

[14:53] Okay. And he's investigating the rest of Book One. The soul through its powers and through its acts, right? Of those powers and so on, and their objects. And then, in the beginning of Book Two, from that you arrive at an understanding what the soul is in a kind of general way, right? And then he'll go on and study the powers in great what detail, right? And come to understand the different souls much more distinctly, right?

[15:23] The plant soul, and the animal soul, and the understanding soul, right? Okay. So, I say that you know it's a little bit maybe confusing what I'm doing there, but so you don't simply misunderstand paragraph three, right? You know, see paragraph three. He's going to consider the substance of the soul, what it is, and determine that. And then he's going to talk about the what accidents, the the powers of the soul, right?

[15:55] Its properties, right? Okay. You might think, oh, well, then we know the soul before we know its powers, right? Or the soul is more known than its powers, and that's not true at all, right? Okay. And that'll be clear when you get into difficulties here, right?

[16:13] Now he begins here to talk about the difficulty. However, to grasp some conviction about the soul is in every way a most difficult task, right? And he's going to talk about the difficulties of knowing what the soul is first, and then difficulties of knowing its powers second. Okay.

[16:39] For this being a question common to many other things as well, I mean the question about the substance and what it is. Perhaps there might seem to be some one method about everything of which we wish to know the substance, just as demonstration is of properties. Whence this method ought to be sought, but if there is not some one common method about the what it is, the undertaking becomes yet more difficult.

[17:10] Okay. So he's saying, what to investigate? What the soul is, right? Is a one way of coming to know what a thing is. See. Is there the same way of coming to know what a triangle is as knowing what the soul is?

[17:30] If there is one common method used within, we have to investigate what that is, right? But if it is there's not the same way that these different things are known, it would be necessary then to grasp what is the mode or way in each case. Is it demonstration or division or some other method, right?

[17:53] Okay. So that's the kind of the first difficulty that he's he's raising here about investigating what the soul is, right? Is there one way of finding definitions, or is there more than one way, right?

[18:12] And if there isn't one way, but each thing has its own unique way of being known, what it is, right? What is the way then that we must know what the soul is, huh? And the variety of what opinions that you have among the Greeks as to what the soul is shows that one has to stop and think about that, right? And a fortiori the moderns don't even know if they have a soul, right?

[18:33] Let alone what it, might be, right? Okay. And then he he starts there at line twenty. There, the difficulty is about what would be inside the definition of the soul, right?

[18:51] For the principles of others are other, as of number and of surfaces, right? Now, of course, the first thing in the definition, it seems, is to decide into which of the genus falls, right? And what it is, huh? Okay. So is the soul an individual substance? a this something a substance, or is it a quality, or a quantity, or something of the others, right? But notice, if you go back to the famous dialogue of Plato there on the soul, the Phaedo, right?

[19:27] Socrates is thinking of the soul as being a what substance, right? And a substance distinct from the body, right? And a substance that's in the body, like a sailor in a boat or something, right? Okay.

[19:44] Some of the Greeks before Plato thought of the soul as being what breath, right? Huh? You know. And when you exhale at the end of life, the soul leaves, you right? Huh? But again, the soul would be a substance distinct from the body, right? Okay. And the one guy is dying in the battle, right? And the soul starts to leave his body, and the big wind comes up and forces his soul back into the body, right?

[20:12] Okay. But then others speak, you know, like Simmias does in the dialogue, that he's heard that the soul is the harmony of the body, right? Huh? You know. And there you think of the soul more as what a substance, but a certain, what, quality of the, you know, it's kind of a harmonization or organization of these things, right? Okay. So what is the soul, right? Huh? What is the genus of it, right?

[20:51] So where are you going to put the soul? Is it a substance, or is it a, you know, is it a combination of substances, an order of substances, right? Then it'd be something accidental, right? A quality,

[21:07] huh? Is it something? Is it an ability, the soul, or is it an act? Huh? That's a very fundamental division that Plato introduced. Act, ability. For this makes no small difference, huh? And one must consider whether it is divisible into parts or is partless, right? Whether what the soul has parts or not, right?

[21:35] And whether every souls of the same species or not. Now, so you'll find it strange that we talk about what the soul of a dog, right? a fortiori, the soul of a tree, huh? A plant, huh? I was saying to my wife there when you're looking for the plants there for the yard, you know. Each one has got its own individual soul here, right? Well, if I say that that the plant has a soul, you know, people might be kind of amused, right?

[22:03] It's not, you know, that's a quaint notion. You know, do you really mean that? You know, see. For until now, those who speak and inquire about the soul seem to look into the soul of man alone. We have that same tendency today, don't you? Right. So people are surprised when Aristotle talks about the soul of a dog, and the soul of a tree, right? Well, the purpose purpose does, right?

[22:34] See. So is it just one kind of soul, or are there many kinds of soul, right? One must be careful, lest they escape one's notice, whether the account of it is one like that of animal or different for each, as horse, dog, man, God, right? Okay. Is there a general definition of soul, and then a definition of particular kinds of soul? Like there's in geometry, there's a definition of quadrilateral, and there's a definition of what square, definition of rhombus, definition of oblongus, and so on, right?

[23:12] Aristotle's going to determine that there's a general definition of soul, but then there's a definition of the plant soul, and a definition of the animal soul, and a definition of the understanding soul, right?

[23:29] Moreover, if there be not many souls but parts, one must consider whether to seek first the whole soul or the parts. That's the question I was raising, right, with you earlier. But it's difficult to determine how these parts are by nature different from each other, and whether one needs to inquire about the parts first, or the works of these, their acts, and so on. But if one should seek first the works of the acts, someone will then be at a loss, and one must seek first the things corresponding to these, right?

[24:04] So he's talking about the objects there, right? Okay. So should we seek first to know what the soul is, or what its abilities or powers are, right? Should we seek first to know its abilities or powers, or to know what the acts of these abilities or powers are? Should we seek first to know the abilities, the acts of these powers, or the objects of those acts, right?

[24:30] Should I talk first about eating, or about food, or about the ability to eat? Or about the soul, whereby we have the ability to eat. Nourish ourselves, huh?

[24:52] Should I talk about the ability to reproduce first, or should I talk about reproducing? Or should I talk first about the reproduced? Okay. So that's again question, right? Yeah. Yeah.

[25:20] Now six is the last paragraph dealing with the problem is about what the soul is, and that's the one I was raising here with these texts a little bit here. But not only does knowing what it is seem to be useful for considering the causes of the accidents and substances, as in mathematics, right? Knowing what the straight is and the curved are, or what the line is and so on, and the plane is useful for grasping well that the angles of a triangle are to so many right angles, so on.

[25:46] Okay, so you might say, yeah, understand what a triangle is, understand what a right angle is, et cetera, right? Understand what parallel lines are. All that stuff is good to know, necessary to know before you can know this property of the triangle. Okay. But also, on the contrary, the accidents lead in great part to seeing the what it is, and this is especially a natural science, huh?

[26:08] Okay. For when we can give an account of the accidents, either all or most of them, in accordance with the appearances, then we will also be able to speak best about the substance. For the principle of all demonstration is to what it is. Once, with regard to any definition according to which knowing the accidents, even conjecturing about them, easily does not occur, it is clear that such a definition is dialectically and in a wholly empty way, huh?

[26:40] Remember the question there, like back in the what? Euthyphro, right? You know. Euthyphro says that piety is what the gods approve of, right? Socrates says, well, do the gods approve it because it is pious, or is it pious because the gods approve of it?

[27:08] So is that the nature of the thing, or is that like a property of it, huh? So the good is what all desire, right? Is it good because we desire it, or do we desire it because it is good, huh?

[27:25] Well, outside of mathematics, we tend to know what the effects, right, and the accidents more, right. So what is a dog? Well, it's an animal. Well, so is so is a horse. Well, it's a four-footed animal. Well, so is a horse. Well, it's a four-footed animal that what barks. The cat is a four-footed animal that meows, right? Okay. That's where I kind of first distinguish them, don't I?

[28:00] But that's something kind of what secondary, right? But that's where I I come to it, right? Okay. What's a comedy? Well, it's a play that makes you laugh, right? So laughter is really an effect of the comedy, right? But I tend to know the effect, right? Before I know what. What comedy is? What the substance of comedy is, right? You know, what is the laughable? Right?

[28:44] We we don't have the Aristotle's part in in the poetics on comedy that's been lost, right? You know, the second part of the thing. But he does say some things that the laughable is a form of the ugly. He says, but ugly does not produce pain, you know, like a like the comic mask or something, right? You know, and you know, like the the red skeleton, so he makes this funny face, right?

[29:08] You know, but it's ugly face, right? You know, and it makes people laugh, right? You see, you know. So, first I was trying to you know get inward to what the laughable is, right? You know,

[29:27] but we first know it from its effects, right? Aristotle is saying, you know, this works both ways, right? You know, but especially a natural science, right?

[29:41] So you can see in those paragraphs up to that point, some of the difficulties starting with four, five, and six, right? The difficulties in knowing what the soul is, right? There's difficulties about what way you should investigate what the soul is, right? There are difficulties about

[30:05] even what genus you should place it in, right? In general, right? And there's difficulties about whether, there's one definition of the soul or more than one, right? And you define soul in general, and then give particular definitions of particular kinds of soul, or is there just one kind of soul, right? So there's difficulties about you know does the definition of the soul manifest the properties of the soul, or is it vice versa?

[30:39] Of course, to some extent, you could say that the two like manifest each other, right? Just like in my example of the comedy there, right? If I know that that an effect of comedy is that the audience laughs, right? Well, that's going to be useful to investigate what comedy is, right? Now you see sometimes in the in the theater there you see the two masks, you know, you have the one the person is kind of smiling or they're weeping or something, you know.

[31:05] So you know the tragedy is a sad story, right? And so on, right? Well, that effect that it has upon our emotions is a starting point for us, right, to investigate what it is intrinsically, right? But vice versa, if I really come to understand what comedy is or what tragedy is. Then I'll see maybe the reason why the one makes us laugh and the other makes us cry.

[31:35] You see, and if it doesn't in some way manifest why we laugh and why this makes us cry, then we don't really what haven't arrived at an understanding really of what tragedy is or what comedy is. Okay,

[31:57] so he's saying something like that about the soul, right? So Thomas says in his commentary about these three parts, we'll be looking at the the rest of this third part here next time. But he says that you know what the author wants to do in the proemium here is to make you what wish well, right? You know, by showing you the importance, the nobility of what is being studied here, right?

[32:28] He wants to make you what teachable, docile, he says, teachable by showing you the order which you want to perceive, right? And he wants to make you what attentive by showing you the difficulty what you're about to to undertake, right? Beautiful explanation there, the three parts, huh?

[32:57] You see that? So you see something of the difficulty here of investigating what the soul is, huh? Okay, so I'll give you these two. readings if you want to look at them in Latin there. you know The Phaedo has two most probable opinions about what the soul is, and like any probable, truly probable statement, it has some part of the truth, but neither one has the what the whole truth, right?

[33:42] You know, have you read the Phaedo or what? Yeah, yeah. I see. The one idea is the soul is a what a complete substance, completely immaterial substance, distinct from the body, right?

[34:09] And the other is that the soul is an accidental form, accidental form of the body, the harmony of the body, right? But some of that same second opinion would be the idea that the difference is what an order, right? Okay. Now, some days I give people a little difference like this. I'll say, what's the difference between a living body and a non-living body? Is it like the difference between the word cat and the word dog.

[34:59] What's the difference between a living body and a non living body? The Greeks called what the elements, and the letters the same word, right? And as Democritus says, you can make tragedy and comedy out of the same letters. And so like this, you can make you know everything in the world out of the same things, right? But here you're saying you're made out of something different. Is that the way the living and the non-living bodies differ?

[35:30] You're made out of different letters, different things. Okay. Or, or is the difference like a cat and, You see that the living living body has something, right? The non-living body doesn't have a soul.

[36:23] Which you could what wanted to separate from the rest, right? That's the way Plato's kind of thinking, or Socrates is in the Phaedo, right? The soul is something that becomes the body and leaves the body, right? In fact, there's a car with a man in it, a car with a man in it,

[37:10] a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man

[37:24] in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, a man in it, In some ways, you'll find something that says, well, a living body's got protoplasm or something, right? You know, you don't have that in a non-living body, you know. But when they think twice, they say, "Well, protoplasm has to be broken down into things that you do find in the what?

[37:37] Nonliving world, right? Okay. So that's probably the most probable opinion, isn't it? You know, but some people you don't think well. you've got podoplasm, you've got DNA or something, you know. But these need to be broken down into things you find in the non-living world, right? Okay. So in that case, you might see the difference as simply being what the order or arrangement of the matter, right?

[38:03] Right here you see it is not just the arrangement or the matter, but it's something added and that comes and goes, right? You know, when C comes to add, you get a living body. And see who it leaves at

[38:23] Yeah See. You see, kind of a common notion that you have of death there, even in the fado is that death is a separation of soul from the body, right? Okay. So the cat becomes active and separates the sea from it, right?

[38:50] Well, here's the cat becomes active and rearranges, right? So which is the soul? Is it a substance distinct from the body, right? That sometimes in the body and sometimes not in the body, somehow or other, right? Or is the soul not really something distinct, a distinct substance in the body, but simply the way the body is arranged, right? You know,

[39:24] a little bit like tuning up, right? When a piano gets tuned up, you don't bring in something and add it to the piano, right? But you kind of shorten or tighten the strings, I guess, right? They're already there, right? You get them into tune, right? And if it gets out of tune, something hasn't left the piano somewhere else, right? Now it's become out of harmony the strings, right?

[39:50] It's become disordered, right? I always take an example in class, and you got these rows of chairs, right? And students, you know, sit down. The chairs got out of order, right? And maybe the janitor somebody comes in and you know arranges these nice straight lines, right? Is that the way the soul is, right? The students doesn't go out of the hall when the students come in, but the students go home and the students comes back in.

[40:22] No, you just take the same chairs and you arrange them a little differently, right? You see? So my, you know, bodily parts are going to be a little bit disorganized and not in sync with each other, right? And I die.

[40:44] I get disorganized. So death is the disintegration, disorganization of my body, huh? You see, Socrates argues against this opinion, right, with a number of arguments, right, saying that sometimes the soul opposes the body, right, like when a man is fasting or opposing the passions of the body, right. But wouldn't the order of the body or the harmony of the body oppose the body? He says. Or he argues that there's a harmony of the soul itself, you know, which is virtue and so on.

[41:27] But is there a harmony of harmony? So is there order of order? Doesn't seem so. And then he argues from from recollection, the one

[41:44] that the soul existed before the body. He's arguing that, but sometimes we'll argue later on from the soul having an operation that's not in the body, right? Like understanding. If you can show that, then the soul can't simply be the order of the body, because then it would have no activity; it was not bodily. You see. But then, you know, in the other position, there's difficulties too.

[42:06] If the soul is in the body, like a sailor in the boat, right? Well, then really there's no connection between the soul and the body. You know, they don't really fit together, right? And then the one whose body is being knocked apart is really.

[42:24] And therefore, the one who's bodies in pain and the one who's thinking about how to relieve that pain is not the same one. Just contrary to our inward experience of life, right? When I'm feeling pain in my body and I'm thinking about how to relieve that pain, that that the one who's suffering is the one who's thinking about how to relieve that suffering, right? Not just being kind to my body, right?

[42:45] I can be kind to you if it's a you in pain. I can help you out of your pain, right? You know, it's a little different when I experience pain myself, right? It's an urgency different trying to relieve my pain, right? You know,

[43:04] or if I lose an arm or a leg or something like that, right? You feel like I've lost part of myself. Even a tooth falls out of that, you know, or the finger or something, hand.

[43:21] But the truth, the whole truth, is not that the soul is a substance distinct from the body, complete substance itself, or the soul is a kind of what, the substantial form of the body. But there's a part of truth in both of those positions. And Aristotle was succeeded

[43:46] in the second book to bring together two parts of truth and see the whole truth for the first time. Church, though, was you know, church finally, I think it was the Council of Vienna, the church, you know, officially adopted Aristotle's teaching there.

[44:11] It's really the only only position that this harmonizes, right? The position of the soul to harmonize the body doesn't harmonize with all the facts, as even Socrates, sees there in the Phaedo, right? But again, the position that the soul is a Immaterial substance, right? Complete in itself, distinct from the body, doesn't harmonize with our experience of our own inward unity, right?

[44:43] But the answer to Aristotle is it's the whole truth, we'll see. It's not true because church adopted it. The church adopted it because it was true.

[45:05] Nowadays, we don't talk about the soul. But it is a kind of a difficulty, you know, that it seems to have. The word "soul" has a more doesn't just have the general meaning anymore. Yeah, yeah. Like you're saying, that's why one of the people say, "You know, a dog doesn't have a soul because yeah, yeah, it's not immortal." I say it's like the problem, you know, an easier matter than that, you know, when about virtue, right?

[45:48] You know, Aristotle says that wealth is the virtue of money. You know, or we can say sharpness is the virtue of a knife, right?

[45:58] Of course, you know, we probably use the word virtue of use it on daily life. Was something that only man can have, right? Only some men, some women, have virtue, right? So, we're jumping to the particular right away, right? And it gives us a lot of problems, huh? And as I explain to the students, they say, you know, if you if you want a knife, you want it to cut well, don't you?

[46:31] You want a knife to cut well. You want it to be sharp. And then you want to know how to make a knife sharp, right? Let's say about human being, right? If human being, you want to function well as human being, right? If you want to have the virtue of human being, if you want to know how to acquire the virtue of human being, same thing, right?

[46:49] Which just says you have to know what the knife's own act is to figure out that sharpness is its virtue, right? So you have to know what man's own act is before you can see what his virtue is, huh? You have to know the virtue is before you can see how it's acquired.

[47:20] So you want the virtue of your eye. They talk now about you know, ladies and so on, you know, I might be afraid of it myself, but but you know the you know we start people as you know so they can see without glasses, right? You know they see well without glasses. You see, but but anyway, you want the virtue of your eyes, don't you? Right? The virtue of your ears, right?

[47:50] You want the quality of your eyes that enables them to see well, right? And yours, right? You want the virtue of yourself as a man, a human being. You know, you you want your your knife to cut well. But you don't do your own act well, right? You know, I mean, you can raise you know the question, not that it was easy to answer what the virtue of man is, is what the virtue of the knife is, but you can see the point, right?

[48:20] Proportionately, the necessity of investigating, right? How stupid it is not to be interested in the question, of what virtue is, right? It's like saying you know, you're more interested in the virtue of your knife, or the virtue of your ballpoint pen, the virtue of your car, then your own virtue,

[48:46] the virtue of your children, or whatever it is you're responsible for, you know. I mean, they can't even see the importance of these things, you know, if they don't understand these things, understand the general, you know.

[49:06] You know, I don't know how clear is Plato, but St. Thomas talks about the immortality of the soul, you know. He talks about the Platonists as thinking, you know, that all souls are immortal, or, at least all the animal souls are immortal, right? And

[49:24] kind of interesting, right? Because that's that's that's one extreme, which is mistaken, right? And the other one of course, is. There's no souls that are mortal, right? And the truth again is in the middle between these two, huh? And

[49:46] it's hard to strike balance, until you see the two, you know. If no souls are mortal, why should anybody think that all the animal souls are mortal you know. Sometimes it's in the earlier thinkers too, because they said, well, what is through itself, right, is before and the cause. of what is through another, right? As? Aristotle says in the eighth book of

[50:23] the physics, right, of the natural hearing. And I was noticing Thomas here is talking there about the vision, and he says, well, it depends upon God, right? Of course, he quotes that. The through itself, right, is before and the cause of what is through another, right? Well, God sees himself, right, through himself, right? And God, what is understood, and that which understands, and his understanding are all one and the same, right?

[51:00] So, and then he quotes the kath' hauto right? through itself is before and the cause is through another. So all the rest of us depend upon God for seeing God. huh But that's an application of that principle, right? I was looking at Thomas, when he quotes it in the Summa Contra Gentiles he quotes it.

[51:28] It's before prior and and principium right? You know, usually the word principium there in the sense of cause, but I went back and looked at the Greek text there and it says proteron and it says aition. You know, one of the variant readings, of course, says kai aition right? And cause, right? Which makes more sense. But it seems to me that through itself is before that through another as a cause is before an effect.

[51:59] Maybe also in the sense of of being too, right? It can be without the other, not vice versa, right? God can see himself without us, but we can't see him except through him, right?

[52:21] It's kind of funny because you kind of think about that principle that you are talking about in regard to the arguments for motion, right? Well, I see. Apparently, the way some thinkers arrive at this is they say, well,

[52:36] the soul moves the body, right? Therefore, the soul has to be what in motion itself, right? Because they think nothing moves another unless it's moved itself, right? So, therefore, if the soul moves itself, and that's how it can move the body, then it has an operation by itself, and therefore it exists by itself, right?

[53:04] Not the way the soul moves the body by moving itself, but some of the other guys before that, you know, the you know, what is it? Those who attribute, you know, to the soul that the soul is fire or the soul is atoms, you know, and they think these these things are moving themselves, right? And therefore, they move the body by moving themselves, right?

[53:32] If you have these random atoms bouncing around moving you, you have no regularity to your motion at all, right? No, would you go, you know, would the cat go towards the victim rather than some other pair So, all kinds of difficulties in these positions, huh? But

[54:03] it's nice, nice to see when Thomas quotes it. You know, you have a before with before and principium, you know, together, right? They're so closely connected.

[54:16] You see, in the metaphysics, you know, in Aristotle in the metaphysics when he distinguishes the the senses of before there, he does so not by itself like he did in the categories, but he does so. in comparison to the common notion of beginning, okay. So he uses beginning there to distinguish the senses of before. But when he defines beginning, you know, gives the common notion of beginning, he he defines it by first, which is defined by before.

[54:48] So I maintain that before is really before, before first or beginning in definition, right? But it's appropriate for the wise man, right, to do everything in terms of the beginning, right? First philosophy. But he's already just he begins with the word beginning, and then later on he comes with the word before, and then he calls the common notion of beginning, and then uses that to distinguish the senses of before.

[55:11] The first three senses of before. maybe. I have to begin with the text in the categories because that's somewhere more, of a independent, you know, or talk about it again. But in the statement of the principle there, the way Thomas quotes it. He says the through itself is before and the beginning of the through another, right?

[55:36] You have before and beginning, both kind of double double axiom there, right? Axiom of before and axiom of beginning. The Greek actually uses the word aition, the same thing in a way. But the actual text says, "proteron and "proteron aition" before cause. But one of the variant readings, you know, is kai aition which I think makes more sense. So it's before and the cause.

[56:42] When you talk about this inward experience as distinct from outward experience. Yeah. Can you say more exactly what that distinction is? It's not a distinction between sensing and. No, no. I say when I when I see, hear, smell, taste, or touch, and well, actually, touch has some inward experience. It was a touch, right? I can feel. You know, stomach rumbling or something, you know, or pain inside or something like that, right?

[57:17] Sense of touch is sort of the sense of the interior, right? Okay. I mean, we have interior senses whereby we know sensing itself, right? So I sense in a way that I see, right? Right.

[57:34] I'm aware of the difference between sensing and hearing, which are in me, right? I mean, seeing and hearing, smelling, tasting, touching. And for sure, when you get to the higher things like imagining, right? And thinking, right?

[57:53] You don't see them in the world around you, right? But I imagine in me, right, something. And sensing is is really, you know, what's even more so than moving around is is very much a sign of a living thing.

[58:17] I think I've mentioned that before, didn't I? How, in a way, sensing is a kind of activity that remains in the one's sensing. As opposed to pushing or pulling or kicking or something like that, right?

[58:39] So sensing doesn't really have an exterior product, or it's not really acting upon something outside of you, right? Sensing is something that goes on within you, right?

[58:52] So you don't really know sensing from outward experience, do you? You know things like you know brain waves, and all sorts of stuff, right? you don't see sensing there in the brain waves, do you? And. Even they try to you know map the brain, you know, and they stimulate different parts of the brain, right? And say, Oh, I'm tasting sugar. I'm tasting chocolate. You know. You know.

[59:31] I'm feeling wet. You know, so on. But I mean, they have to ask the guy what he's feeling, you know, what he's sensing, right? You know, you can't. They don't. They don't see the sensing itself, do they? You know, you know, cutting your head or something, you know, not going to see the sensing going on there, right?

[59:54] Now the image of what we imagine of the all the images are in the brain, aren't they? In a sense, in a real sense, they're not outside. The actual image is in the brain.

[1:00:11] But see, we know imagine an image more by outward experience of them than by opening somebody's head and then see the image there, wouldn't we?

[1:00:21] And then we just, when we reason, we just order these images in a certain. way Well, I better wait to get to the third book here, then we'll see the difference here.

[1:00:32] But Aristotle, you know, I mean, he will begin from our obvious differences, and then he will go into more. And the first way of distinguishing between sensing or imagining and thinking is he'll say that I'm free to imagine more or less than I want to imagine, right? So I can imagine a bottle of champagne in there, right? This can be brought on your own, right? It's a bottle of champagne there.

[1:01:04] But can I think there's a bottle of champagne in there? Am I free to do that? See, see, see. I'm imagining a bottle of champagne in there, but I don't see a bottle of champagne. I don't mean you guys get champagne up here? You know, I don't have any reason to think you'd have champagne up here, right? You see what I mean? See, I mean, I have to have some reason to think that there is a bottle of champagne in there, right?

[1:01:28] But I can imagine a bottle of champagne without having any reason. to know. So thinking's not the same thing as imagining, is there? I can imagine one of those terrorists out there, you know, blowing himself up in here in a minute, or he's going to come in with a machine gun. Shouldn't us? I can imagine right now, visions, put over his head, and you know, question the car for what they thought.

[1:01:51] Can't you imagine out there? See, but am I free to think there's a guy out there like that now? See, I'm imagining a guy out there now with a machine gun. Do I think there's a guy out there now? See, I don't have to have some reason to think there's a guy out there, right? That I saw, him, or the FBI took me off, he was on the way, right?

[1:02:12] See, I can imagine something without having the reason to imagine it, right? Yeah. But I can't think that something is so without having some reason for thinking it so.

[1:02:25] And think is a second difference, right? See that if I imagine it, I don't necessarily feel any strong emotion. I don't I'm not I'm no terribly brave man, but I don't feel any fear now imagining that terrorist out there, you know.

[1:02:44] But if I thought there's a terrorist out there, I would be. You see, so but that's manifesting a difference though between thinking, you know. See, I say I was taking classes. If I I can imagine myself winning the sweepstakes, you know, five million dollars, right? I don't get particularly exhilarated now imagining that, right? See, but if I thought I just won five million dollars,

[1:03:09] is it? I mean, you know, that's not intrinsically showing you the difference between thinking and imagining, right? But it is manifesting, in a sense, what the the difference by its effect, emotional effect upon the two, right? Yeah. I can imagine my best friend in his casket right now, right? If I thought he was dead, though, right, then I'd be sad. You know, you know, see what I mean?

[1:03:37] Yeah. See, but then see the first difference he points out is the one that you have a reason for what you think, and that that fits in what Shakespeare said, right? That discourse, right? Discourse is what You know most known for us about reason, right? Because it's a kind of discourse when you have a reason for something, right? You went from one thing to another, right? Okay.

[1:04:00] So discourse, there you go. You heard the cat, the sound, right? And your mind went from that to the what cat being there, right? Going from the sign or the effect to the cause, right? Now, an animal couldn't do that, right? Well, no, an animal

[1:04:21] has something like that maybe, yeah, but not really. They would just hear a noise and associate it with, you know, yeah, but don't go from one thing to another like we do.

[1:04:35] It was something like that, though. Something like that. Now I can imagine a pink elephant, but there's no such thing as a pink elephant. Yeah, I can imagine unicorn, right? You see, you know, but I don't think that there are unicorns out in the woods, right? Well, that's the same thing, yeah. Yeah, too same.

[1:05:00] Okay. In the Greek Aristotle calls it, you know, when he's dividing them, he doesn't call it nous, you know, he calls it dianoetike, right? which is the Greek word for discourse in the sense to know through another, right? You can see that in the post-analytics you know, he's talking about, you know, all dianoetic knowledge, right, is through another, right? And he shows it by induction, right? Syllogism, induction, and all that kind of in the middle and so on.

[1:05:34] So it's through another, right? That's what the Greek word has that sense. So if it's imperfectly, let's take Spartacus. Try vice versa. Do more

[1:05:57] harm than good, you know. In one pair, the younger brother is being unjust to the older brother. The younger brother has usurped the throne. Frederick has usurped the throne of the duke, right? And the duke is now banished in the in the garden, right? And then you have the other brothers, Oliver, who's the older brother, being unjust to the younger brother, Orlando. As being the older brother, he's kind of inherited the family thing, and he's not providing any way for his brother or his brother's education.

[1:06:28] He just, you know, they have that conflict. And then suddenly you have the the two women who are the daughters of the the duke and the younger brothers who served it, and they are closely bonded together and concerned with each other, right? Of course, eventually, because they're linked with their fathers in conflict, because they are the daughters of those fathers, right? And eventually they they marry the two other men, but but the the brothers reconcile when they finally get out to the woods, right?

[1:07:01] And of course that's the symbol of what nature is, the woods, right? And like the duke says, you know, they find sermons in stones and books in brooks and good in everything, right? So it kind of symbolizes the fact that nature is what, unites, right? Now in King Lear you have again the unnatural presented, where the son or the daughter, right. Is being not only ungrateful to, but you might say, persecuting in a sense, the the father, right?

[1:07:38] But in the case of King Lear, it's two of his three daughters who are persecuting him in a sense. And in the case of Gloucester, it's one of his two sons that is doing him in, so to speak, right? So again, you have some parallelism there, right? But in one case it's the daughters, in the case it's the brother, right? Then you have the good daughter Cordelia and the good brother Edgar, right?

[1:08:03] And so you have a contrast there between the natural and the unnatural. So it's very interesting