De Anima (On the Soul)
69. Summa I q.75 a.6: Why the Human Soul Is Incorruptible (Per Se and Per Accidens, Form and Existence, No Contrariety in the Understanding)
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[0:00] reason to something mechanical, like a calculating machine, and and the real glory is the imagination that imagines these wonderful things that they do imagine well, in science. So, but from democratic. Name of the Father, the Son, Holy Spirit. Amen. God our enlightenment. Guardian angels strengthen the lights of our minds, order and illumine our images, and arouse us to consider more correctly. Saint Thomas Aquinas, angelic doctor. Help us to understand all that you've written.

[0:35] Father, the Son, and the, Holy Spirit. Amen. So we're going to look at articles six and seven here in question seventy-five today. So it says to the six, one proceeds thus. It seems that the human soul is corruptible.

[0:58] Now the first argument on the opposite side. Now, of those things of which there is a like beginning, right? Now, like proceeding or going forward, there seems to be a like end.

[1:18] But the beginning of the generation of men and beasts is alike, because they're both made from the what, earth, huh? And likewise is there the process of life in both, huh? Because, huh, it says in Ecclesiastes, huh? In like manner, all breathe, right? And man has nothing more than the what, beast, huh?

[1:51] Therefore, as is concluded there, one is the dissolution of men and of beasts, an equal condition of what, both, huh? But the soul of the brute animals is corruptible. Therefore, the human soul is what, corruptible, huh?

[2:17] Got that? Okay. Second objection, moreover, what is from nothing can be turned back into nothing, right? Because the end ought to correspond to the what beginning, huh?

[2:44] But it is said in the Book of Wisdom, we are born from nothing, okay? Which is true not only as far as the body is concerned, but also as far as the soul that was created. And therefore, as is there concluded, after this will be as those who had not been, right? Even according to the what, soul, this will be so.

[3:16] Now the third objection. Moreover, no thing is without its own operation. But the operation which seems to be proper to the soul or private to the soul is to understand with a what image,

[3:39] and that cannot be without the body, right? Because image is in the body. For the soul understands nothing without an image. We saw this in the third book about the soul.

[3:53] But the image or phantasm, to use the Latin and Greek word phantasma, is not without the body, as said in the book about the soul. Therefore, the soul is not able to remain when the body is what destroyed.

[4:17] Okay, but against this is what Dionysius says in the fourth chapter of the Divine Names. Because Dionysius, I was thought to be the Dionysius that Saint Paul had what converted at Athens there. So he had quite a bit of authority, Dionysius. Yeah. Now they're not so sure that he is the Paul that the one that Paul converted, but. When did they change their minds about the certainty?

[4:45] Well, the modern scholars, I guess, you know. I think it was Gregory the Great who brought the him back from Constantinople when he was a papal legate there, a papal nuncio or something of that effect. There, I think it was. It goes back to him. Yeah. Maybe before his pope, I think. He brought. His works back. Yeah, We made him known in the Western church. huh? Wow.

[5:16] So let's look at the body of the article now. I answer that it is necessary to say that the human soul, which we call the understanding principle, it's necessary to say that the human soul is incorruptible, right?

[5:35] Now Thomas begins here with a distinction, right? For in two ways something is corrupted. In one way, per se, as such, through itself. In another way, per accidens. What is that distinction he's making there?

[6:08] Whether the thing itself is corrupted or it ceases because something else. is corrupted. Okay, and that would be per accidens right? Yeah. Okay. It is impossible, however, that something what subsisting, huh, something that has existence by itself, which is what we saw in the earlier article where we said the soul was subsisting, the human soul, that is to say, is impossible, however, that something subsisting be generated or corrupted per accidens That is something else, right?

[6:46] Generator corrupted. For in the same way it belongs, huh, for something to be generated or corrupted as for it to be, because it's through generation that to be or existence is acquired, right? And through corruption that is lost, huh?

[7:08] Whence what has being or existence by itself, huh, cannot be generated or corrupted except what by itself being generated or corrupted, huh? But things that do not subsist, as accidents and material forms, huh, that have existence only in matter, are said to come to be and to be corrupted through the generation and corruption of the what composite things. Can just stop in that for a moment, right?

[7:51] Let's take a very humble example here of something that is not subsistent. Let's take the shape of a what rubber ball, right? Huh? Okay.

[8:04] Now, how does the shape of a rubber ball come to be? Does it come to be by itself, or does the shape of the rubber ball come to be when the rubber ball comes to be? The rubber would exist before it. Yeah. Something has to impose shape on the rubber. Okay. And when the rubber is shaped into what a ball, right? Then the shape of the ball, right, that spherical shape, comes to be, right?

[8:41] Yeah. Okay. The spherical shape doesn't come to be by itself, huh? No. It's not created out of nothing. Right. And does the spherical shape come to be from rubber? Remember we talked about this before. Does it? No. See, because if there was so, you know. If the shape of the rubber came to be from the rubber, like the the ball comes to be from the rubber, then some other shape, right, would have to also come to be from what?

[9:18] The rubber, right? If they both came to be from rubber, why would they be different? Yeah. But you have to have a form of a what? Form, right? Okay. And then you ask the same question about that. That comes to be, right? Okay. So the shape of the rubber ball didn't come to be from the rubber, right? And it wasn't created out of nothing, right? So how does it begin to be there?

[9:53] Say. Well, it begins to be when rubber ball begins to be. So it's said to be generated per accidens, right? Because it comes into existence when something else, named a rubber ball, comes into existence. Do you see that? Can you say that last again? Yeah. How does the shape of the rubber ball, that spherical shape, how does that come to be, right? See, it's not created out of nothing, right?

[10:25] Okay, and it doesn't come to be from the rubber, right? So how does it come to be? Well, it doesn't come to be as such at all. But when a rubber ball comes to be, something else, right? Then the shape comes to be, right? It comes to be per accidens. Per accidens, and we'd say, yeah, yeah, yeah. See. Likewise, when my body, if I've been sick or something, and my body becomes what healthy, right?

[10:57] Huh? Okay. What has come to be here is a healthy body, right? Oh yeah. Now what about my health? Has that come to be?

[11:10] So it's per accidens. Yeah. Yeah. My health can be said to come to be when this healthy body comes to be, right? Okay. So that sort of thing is said to come to be per accidens, huh? Okay. And something else coming to be, right? Okay. But if something is subsistent, right? Then it has being not just in another, right? But it has being by itself, huh? And so that can't come to be what, or cease to be per accidens, huh?

[11:51] It has to come to be or cease to be itself, huh? Okay, like a dog or a tree dying, right? Or a dog or a tree being generated, right? Okay. So a dog comes to be not because something else is coming to be, but the dog itself is coming to be. And the dog dies not because something else is dying, but the dog itself is dying. Okay.

[12:18] Now we saw before that the soul was something what? Subsisting, right? Huh? So Thomas is eliminating, in a sense, since he's got disjunctive syllogism here, right? If he's going to say the soul is incorruptible, he could say, well, if it's if it's corruptible, it has to be corruptible per se per accidens, right? Because it's subsistent, it can't be corruptible per accidens. Well, then could it be corruptible per se?

[12:47] Like the man or like the dog, let's say, or the cat or the the tree, right? Okay. Well, he's going to go on and address himself to that now. Okay.

[13:01] It has been shown, however, above that the souls of the brute animals of the beasts are not what. Subsistent by themselves, huh? Okay, and the reason why we say that is that the soul, the sensing soul, which is the soul of the beast, the sensing soul has no operation that is not in the body and through the body, right? And even the most elevated operation, which is that of sensing, right?

[13:36] Clearly, that involves the body, huh? And that's why you know the excess of the object, right? Corrupts the senses and so on. But as we saw before the human soul has an operation, namely understanding, right? And we see this to be true later on about willing too, huh? But it has an operation that is not in the body, right? And therefore, it has an existence by itself and not only an existence in the body.

[14:09] In fact, the body, you might say, shares, right, an existence of the soul, but not completely. So, sometimes to express that by saying that the human soul is not immersed in the body, right, huh? Okay, just like we have something floating on top of the water, right? And part of it's under the water and part of it's above the water, right? In that sense, like the human soul is in the body, but its what existence is not entirely surrounded by the body, huh?

[14:43] And so, it has some operation above the what body. So we're really a rather strange composition, you and I. The Arab philosophers used to say we're on the horizon, right, between the material world and the immaterial world. But. We have a kind of a a foot in both, right? And so we have understanding and will in common with the great angels there that we were imploring before in the prayer, and we have senses and emotions in common with the cats around here, okay?

[15:23] But we have the life of the senses and of the emotions, or can have them, in a higher way than the beast has, right? But we have the life of the understanding and willing in an inferior way, huh? Okay.

[15:42] What does C. S. Lewis say? the love of the angels is ferocious, huh? But we're kind of you know you know lukewarm as as we learn in Acts the apostles and so on, right? We're kind of divided and so on, huh? So, only in, some of the great saints that you see, you know, some of that intensity of the love of the what? Angels, huh? Like you see in Saint Catherine of Siena or Saint Teresa of Avila, people like that.

[16:14] Okay. So we saw before that the souls of the beasts are not subsisting by themselves, but only the human soul. Whence the souls of the beasts are corrupted, when the bodies are corrupted, right? When the animals corrupted, huh? And so they're said to be corrupted. Then what? per accidens, right? Yeah. Okay. It's the dog as such that is corrupted, right? When the dog is corrupted, then the soul of the dog is what?

[16:56] Can be said to be corrupted, right? Okay. Ceases to be, huh? Okay. Just like when rubber ball is squashed, right, huh? You destroy the rubber ball. But when you destroy the rubber ball, you what? Eliminated the shape that the rubber ball had too. Okay. But the human soul is not able to be corrupted since it has existence per se, right? Except it be what? As such, corrupted, right?

[17:28] Okay. Now he's going to reason against this, right? Because the human soul is just a form, right? Okay. Which is altogether impossible, not only about the human soul, but about anything subsisting that is a form only, huh? Now something that is composed, something subsisting, that's composed of matter and form, that could be corrupted, right? If the matter could lose the form it has, right? Because it has existence through that form, huh?

[18:15] But if something is a form only, and something has existence through a form, how can you separate that? Okay. And Thomas gives the more general reason here: is manifest that that which belongs to something secundum se is what inseparable from it, huh? That which belongs to something as such, right, is inseparable from it, huh?

[18:51] So could there be a two that is not a number? No. Because to be a number belongs to two secundum se. As such, okay. In other words, through being two, it is a number. Okay.

[19:12] Same thing would be true about a property too. Could two not be half of four? No, that's inseparable. That's an inseparable property of two. It's a property that belongs to two because it is two.

[19:33] It's half of four because it is two, right? But say if a triangle is green, right? Could green be separable from a triangle? Yes, it doesn't belong to the triangle as triangle to be green, does it? It's neither part of the definition of what a triangle is, nor is it something that follows upon the nature of the triangle, like having interior angles equal to two right angles does.

[20:04] Okay. Now he's going to apply this. I just, you know, illustrated this principle in something easier to see, right? Okay. Now he's going to apply it to the question about form and being. Essay existence, right? Belongs as such to form, which is what? Act, huh? Whence matter, by this acquires existence in act. That it acquires form, huh?

[20:45] I see that first of all, an accidental form, don't you? How does the rubber get to be a ball? It acquires a form. Yeah, yeah. So through its form, it has being, right, huh? Okay. And how does my body get to be healthy? Through health. Yeah. So health is actually form of the body, accidental form, right? And through what does my reason become? I'd say wise, if it is, huh?

[21:23] Through wisdom, right, huh? Just, just a form, right, huh? Okay. Yeah. Is that what they mean when they speak of the form being the entelechia? That's just the Greek word for act. Okay. Okay. So Aristotle says that soul is the first act of an actual body composed of tools, right? The Greek word for actor might be entelecheia, which is kind of a word that Aristotle kind of coined, they say.

[21:53] But anyway, okay, it has the idea of of act, huh? Yeah. You mentioned last week too, when I, yeah, when you say first act of a body composed of tools, could one also

[22:07] suppose another usage would be an organic body, and we spoke of organic body as well. Well, see, in English, when you hear the word organic body, you don't realize it comes from the Greek word meaning an adjective, yeah, taken from the Greek word organon, which means tool. So, and a body organikon, you probably say in Greek, right? Okay. It. Would be a body that's that's composed of tools, huh?

[22:35] That's made up of tools, huh? Okay. Is that the term that's used in some of the Greek texts? In Aristotle's. Yeah, yeah, yeah. See, Aristotle first says that the body having life and ability, right? And such a body is a body composed of tools for the different operations of life.

[22:56] And you know, one of the reasons why your body or even a dog's body has got more diversity of organs than, say, a tree is because it has a higher life and has more. It needs more tools, right? Okay. Incidentally,

[23:20] I think I mentioned before the the use that Thomas makes. You know, I guess it's in the Athanasian Creed. I think it is, but but the saying that the union of of the divine and the human nature in Christ, right? Nothing is more like this than union of the soul and the body, huh? And how do you understand that, say? Because

[23:49] it's not like form and matter. This is the heresy of the Arians, right? Who said the Word was made flesh, right? You have the the flesh, the body there, and in place of the human soul, you have the Verbum, right? No, no, that's that's not where the likeness is. But the body is also what the tool or tools of the soul, right? And important distinction they make the difference between your ballpoint pen, let's say, in your hand.

[24:27] Your hand is a tool that's really joined to you as part of you, right? Yeah. But the ballpoint pen is an extrinsic tool that you use to write, like a hammer or a saw or something like that, right? So the human nature of our Lord is as a tool of his divinity, right? And that's why what he does by his human nature has an efficacy, right? That nothing done by any other human being could have, because this human nature of Christ is a tool joined in the same person, right?

[25:05] Who is God, right? So it has this strength in that huh I mean Thomas says quotes the Dionysius, you know, he'll say, I assume the Latin there, you know, theandricum you know, kind of run together with theos and Andros, you know, God and man, right? But there's a kind of of efficacy, right? And so when you talk about you know Christ dying on the cross, you see.

[25:32] Well, Thomas says if you look in the Summa in the Tertia Pars, there he has a beautiful dialectic there from Augustine. There, a number of these things. One thing is would be to say, man should make reparation for the sin of Adam and so on, because he's the one responsible for this. But man cannot make reparation for the whole of the human race, huh? So you got an insoluble problem here, right?

[26:04] Well, God found the solution to it. I shouldn't use the word "found." He saw the solution for it. And that is that God would become man, right? So as man, it's man doing what? Reparation for man. But as the what tool, right? Of the divinity, it has what efficacy to redeem the whole what human race, huh? Like Thomas says there in the little a drop devote, right?

[26:37] The one drop of which can cure the whole world, right? Huh? See, so it has an efficacy, right? Okay. It's a tool like the hand instead of the pen, though, because of the yeah, it's it's a it's a tool. Join, yeah, join to to the second person, right? Okay, his person. So that's why it has an efficacy, right? Now God also uses the saints as tools, right?

[27:09] But the saints are not what joined to his person, huh? In the way that the human nature of Christ is joined to the person, huh? So that the Son of God is also a man, right? But the Son of God is not Saint Francis or Saint Dominic, right? Or Saint Peter, you know. So I mean, not to say that what they do doesn't have some efficacy, right?

[27:36] Right. But it can't have a efficacy that what the divine, the human nature of Christ does, right? Okay. So it's important to see that connection. And of course Aristotle himself, when he's arguing against the platonists, you know, who speak of the transmigration of souls, and the Pythagoreans, I guess, before him. And the anecdote there is, you know, someone was beating a dog with a stick, and Pythagoras says, "Stop, stop!

[28:04] Recognize the soul in the whelping of the dog. The soul of Berquist or somebody else. One of his friends who had died, you know. Yeah. But Aristotle says, for you know, the soul of a man to go into the body of a dog, take that example, would be like for the the the art of carpenter to go into the art of the violinist or something, right? Huh?

[28:30] You see that? So the soul, in a way, is to the body a bit like an art is to you know the tools it uses, right? Okay. Of course, they're joint tools in this case, huh? But there's again that likeness, huh? So when you hear the word organ, even in English, right? You know, it's a familiar word, but we don't think of the word tool there, right?

[28:56] Which would be the common English word, huh? And a lot of times, you know, if you take the Anglo-Saxon word, it's more meaningful to us than the. Latin-derived word, huh? And I was in college, you know. Someone comes by, "Perquest," you know, that philosophy major. You know, what do they mean by first principles? Well, this means just the first beginnings of analysis. Oh,

[29:25] I always take the example, you know, you know, the student in the in the on the science seminar is that assumption there. He's saying desiccation is a greater problem with land animals than with water animals, huh? And people aren't quite sure what you're saying, right? But if you say drying up or drying out is a greater problem for land animals than for fish, you know, it becomes pretty obvious, right?

[29:55] Okay. So, no, it's going back to the principle here that he's saying here. You have to see that it's through form, right, that something has what existence, right? Whether it be accidental existence, like by Being healthy, right? Or by being wise, or you know, the rubber being a sphere, right? Or through the substantial form that has existence, right? Okay.

[30:28] So if the form has existence by itself, right, and it's not just that the case of material form or an accidental form that by it something else has existence, right? Okay. But it has existence by itself. Well, then it's inseparable from it, existence, huh? Okay.

[30:56] To be per se as such belongs to form, which is act. Whence matter, by this, acquires being an act. That it acquires a what form, huh? And by this, there happens in it corruption that the form is separated from it, huh? But it is impossible that the form be separated, right, from itself, huh? Whence it is impossible that a subsisting form would cease to what be, huh?

[31:32] Now, I don't know if you people have read the Phaedo, you know, but Socrates in the Phaedo, the question comes up about the does the human soul survive death, right? And he develops three arguments that has some interest, you know, in them although maybe some weakness in them. And everybody's more or less satisfied except Simeas and Cebes, right? And they come in with these objections out of the blue, and then Socrates has to, you know, encourage them to get going again.

[32:03] And he replies to the objections, but Simeas, or rather Cebes, rather is pushing Socrates to come up with a necessary reason. And Socrates is getting very close to this, right? Because he's saying that life is in the very definition of the soul,

[32:23] and one opposite cannot admit of the other opposite. Life can never admit of death, right? And if one of two opposites is in the definition of a third thing, that third thing can in no way admit of the what other opposite, right, Now you're just you're simply not familiar. Can the odd ever be even? Can something be odd and even? No. Now, if odd is in the definition of a third thing, belongs to that thing as such, like odd belongs to three as such, could three ever be even?

[33:08] No. No. But now if you take this here, can the wet ever be dry? The wet itself cannot be dry. Now, suppose there's a third thing, like say a cloth. Yeah. Now, could the cloth become dry? Yes. Why? Well, because wet isn't in the definition of cloth, right? Right. Okay. If cloth was by definition wet, cloth could never be dry, right? Okay.

[33:44] Or take another example here. Virtue is never vice. Now, virtue is in the definition of, let's say, justice. Can justice ever be a vice? No.

[34:00] Okay. Then you take the opposites, living and dead. You talk about the body, right? And you talk about the what? Soul. Well, the body that is living can become what? Dead. Why?

[34:26] Because living is not in the definition of body, right? But the soul is the cause of life in living bodies, right? Right. So life seems to be in the very definition what the soul is. Therefore, it cannot admit of death. Therefore, it's deathless or immortal. It's a Latin word, huh? Now, there may be a little bit of problem there, right? Right. Because some souls, right, immortal truths, they're causes of life.

[34:53] Um. To the composite, right, huh? But they don't have life or the operations of life by themselves, right? But the human soul has what? An operation by itself that's not in the body, and therefore it has an existence that is not just in the body. And therefore, it's not only that by which the composite is alive, but it has life by itself, huh? So to to have the life belongs to the soul as such.

[35:30] It's very close to what is being said here, but it has to be, you know, a few distinctions have to be seen, and and in what way life pertains to the what soul. Now, if if by life you mean not just the operations of life, although they're a sign of this, but you mean by life the existence of a living thing, right? Right. Well, then the existence belongs to form as such, right?

[36:00] So if the form has existence by itself, and that existence belongs to it as form, how can it ever be what separated from it? Okay. That's the point he's making here.

[36:17] Whence it is impossible that a subsisting form ceases to be, huh? Now he goes into a little complication here for the sake of those people who want to still think of the soul as being composed of some kind of spiritual matter, right, and so on, huh? And he compares it here to the thinking that he derived from Aristotle, where Aristotle thought that the sun, the moon, and the stars were what incorruptible, right?

[36:47] Okay. Now this was a reasonable guess because they don't seem to what ever be diminished, right? Yeah. Yeah. And when Thomas is going into this in some detail, like in the commentary on the De Caelo et Mundo, the book on the universe of Aristotle, he remarks that Aristotle's reason may be what? Probably. Yeah, because maybe the time that it takes, you know, for the sun or the moon or the stars to corrupt is much greater than the lives of many men, or you know, yeah, see, okay.

[37:30] So Thomas is aware of the probability of that, right? Yeah. And we mentioned, I think, when we talked in the De Anima there about light, huh? Aristotle and Thomas himself, you know, thinks of of light as propagating what? Instantaneously, right? And therefore, is not being a what a locomotion, right? Right. Okay. But since he could have, you know, made the same point that

[38:00] maybe the speed of light is so great that we can't notice any time, right? It takes a little time. Of course, the speed of light, you know, they say was 186, 000 miles per second, something like that. It's incredibly fast compared to anything that we can what follow the motion of, right? Mm. Right. And so it's, but nevertheless, you could say, nevertheless, maybe it's faster than we can what perceive, follow, right?

[38:31] Huh? You know, these magic tricks—the hand is faster than the eye. Well, then maybe light is really faster than the eye, right? And okay, but nevertheless, the sun, the moon, the stars are what material, right?

[38:51] And so Aristotle thought that they must be a different kind of matter than down here, right? And secondly, that the form what completes the whole potentiality of the matter up there. See. As opposed to the forms down here, where when when the clay is actually a sphere. It's still able to be a cube or a cylinder or something else, right? And so it's always in potency to some other form, and therefore it can the the clay sphere can they can cease to be a sphere, right?

[39:29] Because it can lose that form and acquire another one. But if the form was to exhaust all the whatability of the object, then it could have done. Now, notice if you compare Aristotle, say with Anaxagoras, close to the truth, even our point of view, because Anaxagoras is saying the sun is a stone on fire, right? Oh yeah. Apparently, got the idea from one of these meteors, you know, that came to the earth from the sky, still burning, right?

[40:02] Like that happens occasionally here on Earth, you know. It'd be pretty dangerous if it happened very often, right? Usually, they're consumed, you know, before else they come down in the form of you know of ashes. But there's one down in the southwest United States where the Indians had tell the white man, you know, about this big stone coming out of the sky burning, and they thought it was some kind of Indian fable.

[40:22] But. Now they can actually study the landscape, you know, aerial and so on. They can see the effect of this, huh? It's been passed down, you know, from father to son, you know. They're sorry about this huge stone. So maybe those, you know, stars up there are really what big rocks on fire, right? And sometimes they fall and so on. Well, Aristotle saw that if the sun was really a stone on fire, it would have been consumed long ago, right?

[40:46] Huh? You see, and they say that Weizsäcker there, the pupil of Heisenberg, is the man who, you know, in the 20th century, there explained how the sun can put forth so much energy, right? And yet last for so long, right? But something much different from ordinary what fire. It's not the great fire of London that went on for some time, days or weeks, I guess. The other great fire of London that destroyed London in the reign of Charles II, you know.

[41:17] You hear that the famous, you know, what is it? Was it Defoe, right? The famous story there describing it, you know. But that was quite a thing, you know. And it was Wren who rebuilt all the churches there, you know, yeah, St. Paul's and so on. But I mean, the point is, I mean, the sun is putting out so much it can't be ordinary fire. It must be some kind of different thing, you know.

[41:42] That's since Aristotle was, you know, suddenly on the right track, you know. So don't worry too much about this. But anyway, given even that the soul was composed from matter and form, as some say, right? Huh? Still, it would be necessary to lay it down to be incorruptible, for there has not found corruption except where there has found what contrariety. Now, if you remember our study there, the first book of Natural Hearing, right?

[42:13] Changes between what contraries, right? The wet dries out, and the dry is moistened, huh? And the hard is softened, and the soft is hardened, and so on. Generations and corruptions are from contraries and are into contraries, huh? Whence the celestial bodies, become because they do not have a matter subject to contrariety, are incorruptible, right? Okay.

[42:44] But in the understanding soul, there is not able to be any contrariety, for it receives according to the way of its own existence. But the things are received in it are received without what contrariety, and of course the sign of this is that even the what definitions of contraries in the understanding are not contrary. So notice, huh? If there's health in my body. That excludes sickness in my body, right?

[43:19] And if there's sickness in my body, that excludes the health opposed to that, right? If I have normal blood pressure, there can't be abnormal blood pressure at the same time, anyway, and vice versa, right? But in my understanding of abnormal blood pressure or high blood pressure, right, is my understanding of what normal blood pressure, right? And in general, there's the same knowledge of what contraries, huh? So my knowledge of virtue doesn't exclude from me a knowledge of vice.

[43:53] In fact, I can know vice better if I know what virtue is, and I can know falsity better, falsity better, because I know the truth, right? And I know what ignorance is because I know what knowledge is, huh? And in the very definition of ignorance is that it's a lack of what knowledge, right?

[44:15] But in reality, in things and matter, one contrary excludes the what other, right? Yeah. So if corruption is from contraries, right? And even contraries are not contrary in the soul, right? It's not going to be corrupted by its what contrary.

[44:43] But there's one knowledge of contraries, huh? You know, if you read Plato's work, there the Symposium, right, huh? At the end of the Symposium, everybody's kind of you know snoozing under the table there because of what they drank, huh? The only people still awake are Socrates and the two poets, huh? And one is the great comic poet Aristophanes, and the other is a tragic poet, in whose honor was the Symposium, Agathon huh?

[45:17] And the last bit of conversation one hears before the poets pass out is Socrates is saying, if you guys knew what you were doing, huh? You could write both tragedy and comedy. Aristophanes could write not only comedy but also tragedies, and vice versa. Now we know that Shakespeare could write both what tragedy and comedy, and both of them very well. And we've lost the comic work of Homer, right?

[45:52] The Margites. There's a few quotes we have from the Margites, but Aristotle says that the Margites is to comedy, what the Iliad is to tragedy, right? So Homer may be like Shakespeare, knows what he's doing. He can write both, you know, tragedy and comedy, right? But the lesser poets like Moliere just write comedy, right? Or I see, and it's like with an actor, you know, an actor like Alec Guinness, right?

[46:23] He played very good comic roles, huh? But he played a number of what tragic roles, huh? Tunes of Glory and so on. He played that cardinal. That's where he got interested in the church and became a Catholic finally.

[46:38] He had studied the church in order to play this role of a cardinal there during the years during the communist period, you know. And so he started to study the church. and he was a Catholic Yeah, yeah, yeah. But no, it's a good actor. I mean, the supreme actor can play both a tragic role and a comic role, right? When my brother Mark and I taught together in California, there we go down sometimes to the artist workshop there in San Francisco, right, which is a core of professional actors, right, actresses, and then they, you know, fill in with more, you know, temporary too.

[47:18] But I saw the same actor play a comic role in The Alchemist to Ben Jonson, and then he's playing King Lear later on. Wow. And I think he failed in the role of King Lear because he made King Lear too what? Comic. Yeah, too senile, right? I mean, he's a little senile there, right? Yeah. Making him too senile, he becomes a comic character, and therefore he's not really as tragic as as he needs to be for the for the for the drama.

[47:49] Yeah. So maybe coming out of playing the the Alchemist, yeah, he didn't quite get into the tragic role. It always kind of sticks in my mind. Yeah. But Alec Guinness would do that, right? You know, he he plays both roles well. But that's what a good poet does, right? He can he can write both tragedy and comedy, right? T here is the same knowledge, right, of opposites, huh?

[48:22] That shows, in a sense, that the understanding soul has no contrary, but corruption as such is from your contrary. So the soul is not going to be corrupted as such, right? Okay.

[48:43] It is impossible, therefore, that the understanding soul be corruptible.