De Anima (On the Soul)
27. Touch, the Four Elements, and Reception Without Matter (De Anima II, chs. 11-12)
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[0:00] Okay, let's look a little bit at this chapter eleven here now. Okay, the part just a little bit he's given us towards the end of the treatise of the five outward senses, and only a part here about the tangible, huh? And why he translated this in particular, maybe he had a at least get the beginning and the end, right? But also, it does touch upon this thing that's very important: that the knower, in a way, who receives what he knows, is originally what lacking there, right?

[0:37] And this is true even in the sense of touch in some way, but it's a little more involved because you can't be entirely lacking in the object the sense of touch, because things like hot and cold and dry and moist, well, the organ of touch is going to involve those qualities. And this is because they are the basic qualities of bodies, and especially according to the four elements theory of the body.

[1:04] The tangibles, therefore, he says, are the differences of body as body. I mean, the differences which determine the elements: hot, cold, dry, moist, about which we have spoken earlier in those works about the elements. That's the book on generation and corruption, huh? Okay. Now, just recall from what we studied a little bit, in Empedocles, and we mentioned how the theory of the four elements is the longest-lasting theory in chemistry, okay?

[1:36] As to what the basic forms are, and as they began to think of these four, they saw a way of distinguishing them by hot and cold, and wet and dry.

[1:55] And so, what is hot and dry would be the element called fire. What was wet and cold would be the element of what water.

[2:17] Those would be kind of the obvious things, huh? You notice how there are big opposite there, huh? Hot and dry, and wet, and what cold, huh? You know that text is it? Where is it? Isaiah? No, it's in the Old Testament. The one that they're quoting a lot there when they're talking about abortion and so on. He says, "I have put before you life and death, you know, and whichever you choose.

[2:44] " But if you go back to the text; it also says what fire and water, because there are opposites like life and death. Okay. Now, what is cold and dry? Earth. Okay. Now, I suppose they think of the Earth as cold and dry because when you dig down into the ground, it's what, cool. So the basement is cooler than the other part of the house, right? Yeah.

[3:14] And the cellars, you know, where you store the wine, cooler, right? But if you take the water out of the Earth, then it's dry or the what, dust, right? Okay. Now, I got to force air here, right? Yeah. But if you think of air a little bit like what steam, right? Okay.

[3:41] You can see something in the meeting here. Of course, in the universe, it seemed like you had Earth in the middle here, and then on top of that, water, and then on top of that, air, and then the sun moon and stars, fire, and of course this was thought before Aristotle, and of course, air being between fire and water would seem to be sharing something of both, right?

[4:05] So it shares with fire being hot and with water being what, wet? Yeah. Okay. Now, when I teach the four elements, there as a reasonable guess, not as the truth, as reasonable guess, I say,

[4:25] first of all, is it reasonable to distinguish the basic kinds of matter, the first forms of matter? Is it reasonable to distinguish them by opposites as we're doing here?

[4:42] And I say, in general, does it make sense to distinguish things by opposites? For example, if you're going to distinguish human beings or divide up human beings, would you divide them into, let's say, male and white?

[5:03] Does that make any sense? Or female and white? Some human beings are females and some are white. No, the same person can be a female and white, huh? Same person can be a male and white, huh?

[5:22] It makes some sense to divide them into male and female, right? Or make some sense to divide them into good and bad, huh? Or to divide them into young and old, right? Middle age, sorry. Aristotle doesn't call middle age because the prime.

[5:45] But would make sense to divide them into young and white, good and male. Same. Okay. But what is it the good and bad have that? Good and female don't have, or good and white. Yeah, they're opposites, right? Okay. So I get them to accept first of all the idea that you want to divide the basic forms of matter by opposites, right? If you don't have any opposition, it could be the same thing, right?

[6:24] Okay. Then the second thing I say to them is, why take hot and cold, wet and dry? Why not take black and white? Let's say. Why not take hard and soft? Why not take sweet and bitter? Okay. Other sensible opposites. Why take hot and cold, wet and dry? Is it arbitrary, or is there a reason to say that hot and cold and wet and dry are more basic than say black and white, or hard and soft, or even sweet and bitter, right?

[7:13] And of course, you know, I'm saying, now you kids, you know, you're you're ahead of the Greeks by opinion, right, by what you've heard, but they're ahead of you in their thinking, right? They have more reason, you know. What would be the reason to use these opposites rather than those, huh? More universals, now. Yeah, and because they seem to be the causes of these. So if you're looking at the first causes, the first beginnings of things.

[7:42] So you put the white bread in the toaster in the morning, right? And leave it in there, it starts to change its color. Eventually, it'll become black if you kept it in the toaster long enough, right? They heat the black metal, it becomes what red hot and eventually white hot, right? So hot and cold seem to be responsible for what black and white, huh? Okay. And even to some extent, wet and dry.

[8:13] See, so morning, my hair is all you know flying around, and so I wet it down, and it gets dark and what young. And then as it dries out during the day, it becomes what gray and almost white. See? So to a lesser extent, wet and dry influence what the color. So garment looks different, sometimes when it's wet and when it wet. dries, huh? I've been painting the house recently, and you know, and you look at the old paint and the new stuff.

[8:47] It's you know, it's still moist still, right, and it kind of changes its color a little bit. Dries out. This is even more true of hard and soft, right? Because I put the the butter in the refrigerator, which is cold, and it becomes what hard. I take it out and put it in the frying pan, and it is softened by the heat, right? Okay. And you know, you put a sponge in the water, and it becomes soft.

[9:19] And the sponge dries out, becomes kind of hard like a rock. And you know how bread, you know, a stick over something, it dries out, it becomes hard as a rock, and you can moisten it though, right? And soften it again. So again, these are causes of hard and soft. Now, sweet and bitter, things taste differently suddenly when they're heated and cooked, right? Or not, or when they're wet or what dry, right?

[9:47] So these opposites seem to be causes of changes in the other contraries. So these seem to be the most basic opposites that are what? senses know: hot and cold, wet and dry. And you, can see even the modern science how thermodynamics was so close to the deep penetration of matter, instead of heat. So,

[10:15] if you have to know the world around us through your senses, then you have to know the first kinds of matter through your senses, huh? And if you must distinguish many kinds of matter by their what, by opposites, right? And these are the most basic opposites that our senses know. It seems that this is it. You've arrived.

[10:43] There's no obvious way of going beyond those four and finding something before them, huh? It had to be a very subtle and roundabout way, you might say. Some ingenious experiment that would reveal that there might be something before water, like hydrogen or oxygen or something, right? But no obvious way, just using your senses, huh? So you can see why this theory would last for you know two thousand years, from Empedocles to Shakespeare.

[11:15] Shakespeare, you know, has all kinds of allusions to the four elements, like this common common coin. You often in the science he talks about the four elements. Theophrastus says, "You know, I'm all fire and air, and these elements I give to the earth." Theophrastus says, and so on. Okay.

[11:44] Of course, these are very important in theology for what metaphors, right? Okay. So I mean, God is sometimes, you know, righteousness is sometimes more than just a metaphor, but I use the word air a lot, just talking about God, fire, talking about God metaphorically, right?

[12:06] The psalms of thirst, right, where the soul is thirsting for God, and even sometimes God is said to be, what? a rock, huh? So these qualities of the sense of touch, knows, like hot and cold, dry and moist, seem to be the differences of body as body, right? They seem to be the fundamental qualities of bodies, huh? About which we have spoken earlier in those works about the elements.

[12:42] The sense organ for these is the tactile, that in which the sense called touch first is present, the part which is such in potency. For sensing is a certain suffering, a certain what? Undergoing. Undergoing, yeah, being acted upon, huh? Whence the maker makes that other what is in potency such like itself? That's not too well range the sentence there, but it makes something else like itself eventually, huh?

[13:17] But now since the body, which is the sense organ, has to be hot or cold or something like that, it can relax entirely its object. Whence he says we do not sense what is similarly hot and cold and hard and soft, but we sense more what is excessive. The sense being like a certain mean of the contrarieties in the sensibles, and because of this it discerns the sensibles, for the middle is able to discern.

[13:49] So you tend to notice the air when it's what much warmer than you or much what colder than you, right? At just the same temperature, you probably wouldn't notice it, say. Now we sometimes take the example there, the man who goes in the shower, right? And the man goes in the shower, he has a certain level of warmth in there, and he's feeling this. And maybe after a while, he might turn the water up even hotter, right?

[14:17] Because he's sensing it less, right? But that's in a sense a sign that he's receiving now the heat as any body receives heat, huh? And therefore he's not really what sensing it.

[14:34] In the same way, when you go into the ocean, say, to go swimming or something like that, you know, it's kind of shocking when there first, you know, and but as your body gets used to the water, right, then it's kind of. Didn't seem so cold, right? People thought it was like bath water, you know, but it really isn't. Yeah. For the middle is able to discern, for it is in relation to each of these the other extreme, and just as what is to sense white and black must be neither these in act, so also in touch.

[15:10] But notice it can't be completely diluted from this. This is hinting at the idea that the senses have to more or less lack the object of what they see. And this is going to be important later on in talking about why the reason is what immaterial, right? It's going to receive the natures of all material things, And therefore it's going to be lacking, right, in immaterial nature itself.

[15:46] But you see something like this in the senses already, that they are lacking in their what object at first, right? Otherwise they could not receive it.

[16:00] Okay, so that last paragraph is kind of like a summary here. Okay, should we go on a little bit here to the twelfth chapter?

[16:21] Some of the feeble-minded. might wanna break for five minutes. Okay so let's go on a little bit. Now, chapter twelve. there, he's gotten through going through the five outward senses. He's going to say some things about sensing in general and about the senses, and he could be a little more explicit about these things. But Thomas, in his commentary, and expands upon this. He's going to reveal the fact that there's a kind of immateriality in sensing, even though the senses have a what material organ.

[17:06] He says one must grasp generally about all sense that sense is what is receptive of the sensible species without the matter. That makes interesting comparison as the wax receives the sign, the signet ring. That's a very common thing. How you take a a signet ring made out of iron or gold, and you would what melt the wax, and then you stamp it, right? Okay. So the wax receives the form, right?

[17:40] Without the what matter, right? It takes the golden or the brazen sign, but not as gold or what bronze. Okay. Similarly, the sense of each suffers by what has color or flavor or sound, but not in so far as each of these is named, but in so far as it is of such a sort and according to its account, according to its form. It's kind of a reception without matter there.

[18:12] Okay. Now, as Thomas puts on the commentary, you've got to expand upon this a bit because there's a way in which matter always receives form and not matter. Okay. You know, if you're making cookies there at Christmas time, and you've got these little cookie things here, so you can stamp out the dough, Christmas trees and circular things and so on, right? Okay. So the dough receives the shape of the metal without receiving the the metal, right?

[18:44] But that's not sensing, is it? Okay. And that's what I was kind of hitting here at. the fact that the senses are receiving not only the form without the matter. The form without the matter, but in a different way than what it was in the matter to begin with, then. Okay. Now, sometimes we contrast what you might call material reception with

[19:17] the reception in knowing, huh? Okay. And this is the way we contrast, and we say that in material reception, you are receiving the form of another. When we say form, we don't mean just the shape, right? But something that is

[19:50] formal, right? Receiving the form of another as one's own, while losing the form one had. Okay. So when that slab of marble, right, that Michelangelo saw in a marketplace, I guess, he's going to scratch on that someday. He made the Pietà, I guess, out of it, right? Okay. Well, the Pietà received the shape of a woman and her son, right?

[20:37] So it became now the shape of the marble, right? And whatever shape the marble had before he put that shape into it, that irregular shape it had, it what lost that shape, right? Okay.

[20:56] We have a block of wood here that has some kind of a shape, huh? Might be an unnamed shape, the Aristotle said before about something, but it has some kind of a shape, right? But now the artist says, "I'm going to make a a statue here of Thomas here, right? " And he carves it out, right? And well, then the wood would now receive the shape of the shape of Thomas as its own shape, right?

[21:22] And would lose the shape it had, huh? Okay. And that's why we call this reception matter a kind of alteration, right, huh? Because you're losing one form, right, to gain another one, huh? Okay. Now, is that the way your eye or my eye receives the shape of Thomas? No. If I remember him and I go home tonight, I've got his shape in my memory, right? So I have received the form of another, right?

[22:04] But have I received in my eye the form of Thomas as now the form of my eye, or some other part of me, like some bone or flesh inside me, right? Receive the form of Thomas as its own form.

[22:31] Is my eye taking on this? No. One of the Greek philosophers said, "Look in somebody's eyes, right? You can see your own shape in there, right? " As if that's what it is. Not really what what receiving is. It's a little bit like you know the mirror, right?

[22:52] So receiving the form of another, not as your own, but as what other, right? And this is the what first difference between the material receiving and the receiving in knowing. Receiving the form of another, not as your own form now, right? But as the form of what of another,

[23:20] while keeping the form one has. Okay. That seems to be the difference, huh? That the non-living thing, their material thing, or the non-sensing, I should say, the non-knowing thing, it can receive the form of another, huh? Only by what losing the form it what had, right? And acquiring the form of another as its own form now.

[24:07] By knowing, this is true. The more higher knowing is, you're receiving the form of another as other, huh? Doesn't become your form. And keep the form you have.

[24:29] So when we define, for example, things, huh? You know, our reason is receiving the what the natures of these things, huh? But do they become the nature of the reason itself?

[24:46] When reason understands what a dog is, that the reason becomes a dog? No. No. But it has, you might say, what? We see the nature of the dog itself, right? It's grasped the nature of the dog, right? And just as when I grasp the chalk, the chalk is contained in my hand, right? So when the reason grasps the nature of a dog, which it does to some extent,

[25:12] the irascible animal, there, right? Um, the just an incident on the paper there today, there about this pit bull, you know, and these crazy animals, you know, and it bit the woman, and the kid jumped up in the car, and then the policeman got it down, he's holding it down, but the dog was eating through his his vest, everything, so finally he killed the dog. But there, so we know something about these animals, right?

[25:39] They're something irascible, right? Yeah. But but you become a pit bull when you receive the nature of the pit bull in your mind, you know. I know something of the nature of that thing, and I have something of the nature of the pit bull in my mind. My mind lost its gentility,

[26:04] its calmness, and so on. So receiving, huh? The form or the natures of other things, right? While retaining your own nature, your own form.

[26:23] There's a kind of immaterial reception, huh? It's called immaterial because it's not of this kind that we find in matter all the time, huh?

[26:39] So if you think of the way in which the artist receives the shape of the person he's painting or drawing a statue, making a statue of, in his eye, right? And the way the wood or the marble or whatever it is he's making the statue in, clay could be right. Is the clay in the in the artist's eye receiving the shape of the victim, the shape of the person being painted or the person being sculpted, huh?

[27:15] In the same way, this seems to be the what the difference here that Aristotle is hinting at, right? That's receiving the form without matter and not in the way that matter receives, huh? But Aristotle wants to go on to point out that this reception is not entirely what immaterial in the case of the senses, because they're bodily organs, and they also receive in this other way. Okay.

[27:53] Now go back to the example there of the sense of touch. Why is it included there? Why do I feel the warmth of the water when I go into the shower at first more, right? And then after I'm in the shower for a while, I might even turn the water on hotter, right? As if I'm not feeling the heat as much, right? But it's because I've been receiving, to some extent, the warmth of the water as the warmth now of my own body.

[28:33] See? It takes a little bit of time for that warmth of the water to become the warmth of my own what? My own body, right? And insofar as I receive the warmth of the water as my own warmth, right, then I don't seem to what? To know it so much, right? As if there's An opposition between receiving the warmth of the water as the warmth of my own body and knowing it to be warm water, right?

[29:13] In the same way, the example that I gave the ocean there, my wife's cousin, you know, he'd do some manual work in the summer, and then he would come home, and he had a, you know, one of these snorkel devices, you know, for breathing underwater, and he had a pool. So he'd come home, it was all hot, you know, up and down in the sun all day, something like that.

[29:32] He jumped down to the bottom of the pool with a snorkel device; he could breathe, right? And he'd stay down there, I don't know, fifteen, twenty minutes, right? But it really brings your body temperature what down, see? And then he'd come up, and he's, you know, internal cooling system, right? So he had a pool, he had a struggle to do that. obviously So,

[29:56] but notice you've got to feel the cold of the water first more when you jump in, right? Just like I was saying in the ocean there, and then you have to adjust a bit to the what coldness. I used to, I can't go swimming. There's a little pressure right in you like that. You know, you know, you know, I hit my midriff, and you have to about here, and then I can find that you don't start swimming in the water.

[30:18] But I feel the coldness of the water more. I know the coldness of the water, right? More when I first what get in there, right? That first shock of the water goes against you, huh? I used to go swimming in the lakes there in the Twin Cities with my friend Roy, and you know, and he would get in there, and he'd say, these kids like to splash you when you first come in.

[30:39] They say, "You splash me," says it all. Hold your head underwater. But it is a kind of shock the first time, right? You see, the water is kind of, you know, a shock to the body, right? But you're feeling the coldness, huh? But as it becomes somewhat the temperature of your body, then you don't know it so much, do you? You see, so that opposition between the material reception and the what reception of knowing, huh?

[31:14] Is seen in that example. Insofar as you receive it as your own, you don't know it so much anymore, right? But takes some time for that guy into the water there, you know, when he comes home from his working outdoors, to for his body to take on the temperature of the water as his own temperature. Okay.

[31:46] That's kind of an expansion there upon Aristotle's touching upon there, 57. Now two fifty eight is simply distinguishing between the organ, which is the body, and the power itself, which is like the form, right? We talked about that before when he talking about the soul itself.

[32:15] But now in two fifty nine, he wants to point out that the senses, nevertheless, are bodies, and they do receive this other way, and they can be what corrupted, right? By what the excess of their objecta. So if the sound is too loud, it can what injure the ear and make them deaf. I don't like these young kids, they say, hearing all this rock music and so on, rock concerts, their hearing is being affected by this, right?

[32:50] And you know these guys who work with machinery too. You know they. I worked in the factory sometimes when I was in high school, and these guys are like, bang, bang, oh, it hit in my ears. How can the guy stand it? Well, you don't realize the guy is deaf now. He doesn't hear these sounds anymore, right? He's killed his his thing there. Um, the reason for that, as he says, is that the sense power is a certain what ratio or proportion, and it's what that's disturbed, huh?

[33:24] Just like you you know pull the strings and the violin too hard or pluck them too hard, and it gets out of what tune, right? So the senses are acted upon in the way that matter is acted upon too. It appears, however, from these considerations, why the excesses of the sensibles sometimes destroy the sense organs. For if the motion be more powerful than the sense organ, it dissolves the ratio, the proportion there.

[33:53] But this was the sense, huh? This was the sense power, just as striking the chord strongly. In the musical instrument, there the concord and tone are destroyed.

[34:05] Okay, and he kind of touches upon why the plants don't have the what ability to sense; they don't have that definite what ratio or proportion, huh?

[34:26] So what is exactly is is the ratio in the senses like? You've done unfolding it. Well, that's like the form, right? You see, the the Pythagoreans said that the soul is the harmony of the body, right? And they argued from the principle that like is the cause of love, right? So if the soul delights in that which is harmonious, like in beautiful sounds or beautiful pictures, right?

[35:14] That's because the soul itself is a harmony. Aristotle doesn't think of the soul as being the harm of the body we saw before what he thought the soul was, but he sees that as having truth about the what sense organs themselves, right? Because the sense organs themselves, have a certain harmony or proportion, they delight in what is harmonious, huh? What is well proportioned?

[35:45] So the sense organ isn't proportioned to handle the sensible. No, he's saying that because the sense organ has a certain what harmony of parts, right? A certain ratio and proportion of parts, right? It delights in what is beautiful, right? The eyes and the ears, huh? Because they are well what

[36:11] they are like the sense organs, and likeness is the cause of love, huh? Now you have something like that even the things where we don't speak of. the beautiful, You know, like like when you buy a German wine, right?

[36:30] You should look on the bottle this that says mit Prädikat at least, right? That's kind of the the threshold there, because if it doesn't say mit Prädikat on there, it's probably sickeningly sweet.

[36:45] But the one mit Prädikat is there's kind of a balance there, right? The ratio of the sweet and the acid and so on, and it's much more what refreshing and not sickeningly sweet, huh? So the senses delight, right, in that, huh? Unless they've been destroyed by hot peppers and everything, you see.

[37:10] But you know, I went to a Chinese restaurant with, my wife, you know, and and ordering individual meals at that time, and I said, I think I'll try one of these hot ones just see. And after about four or five bites, you know, just a burning sensation in my mouth. You know, you couldn't even enjoy the rest of the meal because your sense organ was at least temporarily destroyed.

[37:36] But they, you know, they say you know that men are more apt than women you know, to, put a lot of seasoning on their food, you know, more salt, more pepper, more whatever it is on the thing, and more muscular it is, so that men's sense organs, you know, since the taste and smell and so on are more what. Dull, you know, and you know say women are better at smelling, you know, things and tasting them, right, than a man is, because the men have kind of burned out their sense organs, you know.

[38:14] Our bedroom is is near where the garden is, and all he says, "Oh, can you smell that such and such coming in? " I'm trying to smell it. You know, that's such and such flower out there, " he says. You know.

[38:33] As a kid, you know, you ever get these these things like the, you know, the kool aid. You eat that straight the kool aid, you know, stuff or those sour things, you know, sour beans or something. You burn your senses out. Well.

[38:51] So I was still saying that the senses involve some kind of a harmony or ratio proportion, right, and therefore they naturally delight in what is well proportioned.

[39:04] And you see, especially as I say in the in the arts of the beautiful, right, and the sensesly beautiful, senses sight and hearing, but nevertheless you find it also in a way with the what lower senses, like in that. You know. Good tasting food, right? There's some balance there. It's pleasing to the senses.