De Anima (On the Soul)
Lecture 15: The Soul as Form: Proportions and First Act

Transcript
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These are an axe only in ability, aren't they? But after they've been shaped in a certain way and put together, then you actually have an axe, right? And then you can go out and chop down the tree in your backyard. A cherry tree, whatever it is. Do you see? What is the soul, right? What's analogous to the soul is not what you have. You have the raw materials there of wood and metal, right? The soul's not there yet. What's analogous to the soul? Right? Nor is chopping what is analogous to the soul, right? That's after having what is analogous or proportional to the soul, right? But something in between those two, right? Okay? It's the act that enables you to call this an axe, right? What is this? So if you just looked at the raw wood there that hasn't cut it yet or shaped it and the metal is going to have to shape and so on, right? What is this? An axe? I wouldn't call that an axe, would you? Except an ability, right? Okay? But you wouldn't say simply that it's an axe, right? What is this, right? When it gets its form that enables it to be used to chop down trees, right? Then it actually is an axe, right? But the chopping down is a further act, right? That you do after the axe has been formed, right? You see? So what is the soul proportional to, right? What's proportional there to what inwardly makes the axe to be an axe and to be called an axe, right? To include certain kinds of matter like wood and middleware's definitions? Yeah, you might, yeah. Verstall was thinking, you know, always that the form is what completes the definition, huh? Okay? So out of the same wood and middleware you can maybe make other tools, right? Okay? Now, you know, let's make a comparison here, but don't, you know, see which way they're like, right? You go back to the three kinds of examples that Aristotle used in the first reading in natural philosophy there. He's trying to manifest that we know things in a confused way before we know them distinctly, right? You're going to manifest this by the fact that we know the hole in a confused way before we know it distinctly. And he takes as his first example a sensible hole like a salad dressing, right? Or painting or symphony, right? Because that's the hole that's most known to us. This is a hole that is composed of parts that the senses in some way, what? Know, right? And the senses taste the salad dressing or they see the painting or they hear the symphony, they don't distinguish all the parts or all the ingredients at once, huh? And only gradually do they go to a more, what? Distinct knowledge, huh? Of the parts making up that painting or salad dressing or that symphony, huh? And then Aristotle goes to another composed hole, right? The definition, huh? Which is less known to us. And he points out how we tend to name a thing before we can define it, huh? But the definition spells out distinctly what the name says in only a confused way. So he's moving from the more known to the less known, right? And then finally he goes back to the senses and he takes something like what he wants to show eventually that the general is known before the particular. So he takes something like, much more like the universal hole. In fact, they sometimes call it the more general sensible one. So, you know, when I'm looking up at the hill there and I say, hey, there's something up there in the hill. Yeah, there's something up there. Yeah, I can't make know what it is but I see something, right? What's like knowing something in a very general way, isn't it? Something. Yeah, I think it's moving. I think it's moving. A little more distinct. Something moving. See? Yeah. It's like a dog, yeah. It looks like, what's the name of this dog around here? What's here in the four of the guys? You see? Yeah. So we're going from what? Something, something moving, a dog, maybe a red dog, is that, huh? Susie? Rosie. Rosie, excuse me. Rosie, right? See? So, it's like going for the general in particular, right? Because Rosie's a red dog but not every red dog is Rosie, right? And every dog, maybe he's a moving something but it's not a moving something. It's a dog, right? And so on, huh? So it's closest to what he wants to manifest ultimately, the what? General is known before the what? Particular. So he's both going from what is more known to us, composed hole is more known to us than the, especially the sensible composed hole than the universal hole, but he's also going towards, what? He's approaching, you might say, right? With examples that are closer to going from the general to particular. The same way here, right? He's starting with what is more known and going to what is less known, but at the same time he's starting with what is less like the soul, right? And going to what is more like the soul. One must consider also what was said in the case of the parts and it's the second we've got to manifest it. For if the eye was an animal, its soul would be its what? Sight. And when he says sight here, he doesn't mean the act of seeing, right? Because the word sight is sometimes equivalent, right? But he means, in a sense, the ability to see, right? Okay? For this is the substance according to a count, huh? This is what it is, right? The form, you might say, the eye. But the eye is the matter of sight of the ability to see. Which being left behind, the eye is no longer an eye, except equivalently like the eye of a statue of a painting. So an eye, by definition, is something able to see, right? Okay? And if it lacks the ability to see, it's not really an eye, except in another meaning of the word, right? Like the eye of a dead man, right? Okay? But even more clearly, like the eye of a statue or of a painting. It has something of the shape and color of an eye, right? But the eye doesn't see in the painting, does it? So the eye in the statue doesn't have the ability to see. And therefore it lacks what would be proportional here, right? To the soul, right? So notice what he's saying here. He's saying if the eye were a natural body composed of tools, it was a natural body which is a subject of the soul, right? Then its sight, its ability to see, would be its what? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So notice like, in a way you have a proportion where you're saying that the soul is to this natural body, et cetera. Something like the ability to see is to the eye, right? Is it the eye again? Okay. So if the eye was that thing we call a natural body, then its ability to see would be its what? Soul, right? Okay. Just like in the first comparison, the soul is the natural body, something like what? Um, let's say the ability to chop in the end of it. But notice, huh, you know, if I was giving an exam, you know, how says the IQ exams, the A is to B as X is to the you've got to That's the way you go on, right? If I was going to give you gentlemen this kind of exam, right, I'd say to you, you know, the source of natural body as seeing is to the eye, the ability to see is to the eye, right? And you'd have a little spot that you'd have to check out the right answer, right? And if you checked the source of natural body as seeing is to the eye, then I'd mark that off, minus two, right? Kicking off, right? If you say that, then you don't see the what? Proportion, right? You don't see in what way they are like, right? What would be to the natural body as seeing is to the eye? One of these operations is a living thing, right? And see, if we got here, I might get two things, you know. The soul is the natural body as chopping is to the axe, right? I don't have experience, you know, in my classes, so I was going to check that chopping is to the axe, right? But then I had to mark that incorrect, right? Because that is a what? Second act, right? And this here is the first act. And the ability to chop is the first act. So the soul is not the second act of the natural body, but it's the what? First act, right? Now this ability to see a proportion is very important for understanding things and for what? Discovering, right? So you see the little essay of Einstein, he's trying to explain the fourth dimension, whatever the fourth dimension is, right? He's trying to explain the fact that we have a hard time understanding the fourth dimension because we're, what? Three-dimensional. And so he makes a comparison, you know. Compares us to a, what? Two-dimensional creature, right? Living in a three-dimensional world. How would it discover that it's living in a three-dimensional world? So you develop that kind of analogy, right, huh? Because we can see in a way what a two-dimensional creature would be like living in a three-dimensional world, huh? And that's kind of a proportion, right? He's helping us to try to understand what it is for a three-dimensional creature living in a four-dimensional world, huh? But Pierre Duhem there, the famous scientist there, who is also a very great historian of science, right? He says, you know, the usual way that discoveries are made is by seeing a, what? Proportion, yeah. How is the inverse square law discovered by Newton and his contemporaries, huh? You know what inverse square means, huh? It means one over x squared, right? So if you have, talking about the force of gravity between two bodies, and if you double the distance between those two bodies, the force of gravity between them is diminished, right? But is it cut in half? See? No, it's going to be one-fourth of what it was before, right? So it's one over two, and it stays squared, right? If you triple the distance, and you diminish it by one-third, no? By one, what? Nine. Nine, yeah. Well, they had already discovered, they already knew, that when light spreads out, it diminishes, what? Inversely as a square, right? And so since gravity seems to spread out evenly like light, right? And they reasonably guess, right, that it's going to diminish inversely as a square. Now they say, when, um, there's a famous British scientist, they used to give lectures at the British Museum. He was trying to explain the inverse square a lot, he would have the place kind of dimmed, and then you use a little square, right? You have a little light source, and the light source casts a what? A shadow on the wall, right? Now if you double the distance, or let's say you're not half of it, what happens? If you double the distance, you're going to get a what? Smallish. Yeah. There's going to be half as big a square? And apparently it's one-fourth as big as the original one, right? So you can kind of see in a way that your imagination can grasp the inverse square law in regard to what? Light, huh? Actually, going back to the sixth book of Yukta, right? Yukta, it's shown in the way the geometry went. You know, if you imagine a, what, a pyramid or something like that, right? And you collect the distance in half, there's going to be the ratio of these two. Of what, two, the bases? Yeah. The base, that would be as the... One to two, the side, with the base itself would be one to what? Four, right? The problem is with the slave one, right? If you double the side, you get a square of what? Four times as big, right? So actually, if it's basically just in geometry, then they saw it in light, and then they saw it in gravity, then, okay? That's one example of a very famous theorem of something that is proportional, right? The same way, I guess, with waves, huh? If you drop something very gently into the water, are the waves going to have, the waves going to be longer or shorter? If you drop a marble, let's say, into a plastic water, right? Longer. The more, the higher you drop it from, the waves will be longer or shorter. If you go higher, the waves will be what? Shorter. Shorter, yeah. Yeah. Okay? If you just very gently tap the water, you can do a very, like, long wavelength, right? Then when they started to talk about sound waves and light waves and so on, you can't guess that the shorter the wavelength, right? The greater the what? Energy, right? Okay? So they're always being led by proportions, some of which are, you know, stronger than others, right? So in discovery and just in trying to understand, the ability to see a proportion is extremely, what? important in philosophy and in science, right? And of course, you know, it's very important in theology, right? Christ's parables are usually kind of an extended proportion, right? The Lord is my shepherd. It's built on proportion, isn't it, right? God is to us something like a shepherd is to his flock, right? So we're sheep, you know, when it's in the likeness to him, right? Well, I said, we were like the sheep, right? But we do need to be directed and so on, huh? Okay? One must grasp, then, what is said in the case the part about the whole living body. For there is a, what? Proportion, right? Okay? I mentioned before how the word proportion has become somewhat equivocal, right? And sometimes, you know, the moderns, even Thomas, we use the word proportion to mean a, what? Ratio, right? Okay? But Euclid, you know, in the translation of Euclid we have. Proportion means what? Likis. Likis are ratios, right? So, I mean, you can start with numbers, say, 2 is to 3, 3 is to 4, 4 is to 6. These are examples of what? Ratios, right? Yeah. Okay? And in Greek, singular, the Greek word would be what? Logos, right? Yeah. Okay? But then you come back and you see, well, these two ratios are what? Similar. You say 4 is to 6, that's 2 is to 3. Then you can pause and say what? Proportion, right? But the Greek word would be what? Analogy, yeah. So, in Euclid, you have Logos and Logi or something like that. In English, it could be translated, I think, in this edition. It could be ratio and proportion, right? And ratio and Logos are very similar, aren't they? Because they both can also mean reason, right? It's reason that knows the ratio of one thing to another. It's reason that knows Logos, in the sense of ratio. If I had to define ratio in the sense, you could say it's the order or relation of one thing to another, right? Okay? By proportion here, is the likeness of what? Ratio. Okay? But then it gets confusing, because people started calling ratio and proportion to find a very common in modern science. And you find it in Thomas today, right? Thomas will often use the word proportion in the sense of what? Ratio, right? So I think it's an unfortunate, you know, happening or occurrence, you know? But they've got to be aware of that fact, right? Okay? So the Greek word here would be, it's translated there. For there is a proportion, right? As the part is to the part, that's the whole sense of the whole sense of the body. The Greek says, ana logan, right? The word analogy, right? Ana logan. Ana logan gar eke. Hos to meras, as the part, pros to meras, hutos das, e holy estesis, pros to holan soma, towards the whole body, sense of the body, as such. Okay? So it's a proportion, right? In the sense of, if life is a gracious, this is to that, right? Okay? As, as what? The ability to see is to this part called the eye, right? So the soul is to the whole sensing body, right? We defined before. Now there, you're using body. Eye is the composite. The ability to see, plus the eye. Well, here he calls, you know, the eye is the matter of sight, right? And he's using it as, not the composite, right? But the subject in which the sight is. Back there on line, we're up on line 21, right? So the Greek being, the critical line, eye, couldn't even tell us. So, yeah. So in the Greek it says, ho-op-thalmos, which is the Greek word for eye. So get the word for, what do you call it, doctor, eye doctor? Ophthalmologist. What? Ophthalmologist. Yeah, yeah. The Greek word for the eye. So it says, ho-op-thalmos is the hulae, right? That's the Greek word for matter. The hulae of cells, right? It's the matter of sight, right? Which leaving is no longer an eye, except equivocally. The stone and the painted one. So it's not what has thrown off the soul that is what is potential in a manner that it might live. It's not what lacks the soul, right? That is living in potency or having the operations of life. What has a soul? But the seed and the fruit are such bodies, what? Potentially, right? Okay. As therefore cutting and seeing are actualities. But now what? Second act, right? So also is waking, right? While the soul is as the sight. I know it's in English, you know. The word sight is equivocal, I think. It can mean the act of seeing, right? But sometimes we use in English, I think, the word sight to mean what? The power of seeing, right? Okay. So we see the blind man, right? Lacks sight. What do we mean? We probably mean he, what? Yeah, he lacks the power of seeing, right? Okay. So it's sight in that sense. The power of seeing. Rather than seeing itself, right? It is proportional to the, what? Soul, right? Okay. And the power of the organism, he says here, right? But the body is what is in potency, right? But just as the eye, there you see another sense figure, right? The eye is the pupil and the sight, the power of sight, right? Then the living thing is the soul and the, what? Body, right? Okay. So you see what Aristotle has done then, right? He's made two comparisons, right? He's proposed two, you might say, what? Proportions, two likenesses or ratios, right? To manifest what the soul is, right? To manifest the definition of the soul, right? But things are more known to us, huh? So the power of the axe to destroy the tree, right? To chop down the tree, huh? Is more known to us than the soul, right? The power of the eye to see, right? Is more known to us than the soul, right? But the soul is in some way, what? Like the power to see. In what way is it like it? Proportionally, right? Okay. In some way, the soul is like the power of the axe to chop down the tree, right? In some way, like the power of the ballpoint pin, right? To write. But it's not proportional to the writing. It's the first act and then the second act, right? That therefore the soul, kind of a corollary of this now. That therefore the soul is not separable from the body, or some parts of it, if it is naturally divisive of the parts, it's not unclear. For some of the parts, it is the, what? Act of those parts, right? Okay. But indeed, nothing prevents, he says, some parts being separated, if they are not, what? Acts of a body, right? He's going to show later on, in book three, that the power to understand, right? And the power to choose, and so on, are not, what? Acts of any part of the body, right? But you have to show that, right? Okay. But you have to investigate the powers through their acts, and the acts of the objects, right? So it's that way that you'll come to understand that the soul has some powers that are not in the body, right? And therefore the soul's existence is not immersed, as Thomas says, in the body, right? An interesting way of speaking, right? Now you put a body in the water, right? And sometimes it's completely submerged and immersed in the water, right? Other times part of it is above the water. By the way, that's what? Borrow that word to talk about the soul's existence in the body, right? If the soul has no power that is not in the body, if it has no power that doesn't operate through a bodily organ, then there'd be no reason to think that the soul has any, what, existence except in the body. But if the soul, as I said back in the premium, if the soul has some power that's not in the body, it does something but not in the body, then its existence is not only in the body, right? Okay? That's the way you have to approach the thing, huh? I don't know why he adds this here, because to some extent he's shown this already. Moreover, it is unclear whether the soul is the act of the body in the way of the sailors or the ship. Maybe he's going to talk about later on that the, what, the soul does in some way move the body, right, huh? Okay? Because he's already, in a way, shown that the soul is not simply in the body as a sailor in the boat. What, what sense is the soul in the body? Go back to the senses again. Yeah, form and matter, which is the fifth sense, yeah. The soul is not in the body as water is in the glass. But, you know, the paganists kind of, you know, spoke as if the soul is, like, imprisoned in the body. Now, a lot of, you know, writers have spoken that way about the soul. But, strictly speaking, the soul is not in the body, it's in a prison. It could then be in the body as in a, what? Place. A place, right, huh? But I think most people think of the soul, they think about it at all, as being in the body as in a, what? A place, right? So, when someone dies, they say, what? He's gone. She's gone, right? Soul's left the body, right? And those words you're taking from will change the place. But does the soul leave the body as the sailor leaves his boat? Or a man leaves his car when I come in here? My car? Then you have, you know, the kind of skeptical biologist or skeptical doctor, the guy who's done a lot of, what, autopsies or dissected all kinds of things. I've never found a soul among the parts of the liver here and a lung and a heart and a, you know? But you've never found a soul, right? But is the soul in the body as a part is in the whole? See? I mean, it's more like the way in which the, what, shape of this glass is in the glass, right? Although it's not an accidental form, right? But in some ways like that, right? Proportionally. Right. Or even like the order in the letters of the word cat, right? If you cut up the word cat, like the letter C, the letter A, the letter T, well, use the order over here, you know? Well, it's not in there like that kind of a part, is it? Well, the soul is in the body as a form is in matter. That's why it has a unity, right? That is so great, huh? Now let's look at the second chapter. What is Aristotle going to do now? He's arrived at the definition of the soul by those six divisions that we talked about. We are decided to be so itself and we are decided to that which the soul is an act. And he's manifested that definition by these two proportions, these two likenesses of ratios. What's he going to do now in the second chapter? Well, what he's going to do here is in a way syllogize. He didn't say he's going to demonstrate the definition of the soul. But what he's going to use as a middle term to demonstrate this? Again, something more known to us, right? So he's like starting over again, right? To manifest the definition of the soul. But since from what is unclear, but more apparent, comes to be what is clear and more known according to account, one must try once more to recount the soul thus. Now, I don't know if I like that translation altogether, do you? What kind of man do when he's hard to translate these things? In a sense, I think he's touching upon what we saw back in the beginning of the first book of the Natural Hearing, right? The first book. What is more known to us, right? Towards what is more known by what? Nature, right? But it's not said as clearly, huh? A sense, he says, from things that are unclear, but what? More manifest, right? Meaning to us, I think, right? Comes about what is clear and more known, kata to moga, according to reason, right? We're not to try, huh? Again, to go through about this, huh? Again, he has that word, one must try, peratea, in Greek, right? Showing the difficulty of this, right? Okay. Now, in a way, what he's going to do is to what? Reason from the second act, huh? To the first act, right? From what is more known to us, right? To what is more fundamental to reality, right? Okay? Now, it's kind of a strange comparison here at first he's making here at 1.24. For it is not only necessary for the definitive account to show that that, as most terms do, but also to include and show the cause. But now the account of terms are like conclusions. For example, what is squaring? Making an equilateral triangle equal to an oblong rectangle. But such a term has the account of a conclusion. But the one saying that squaring is the finding of the mean proportional says the cause of the thing, huh? Now, are you geometrists? Can you expound that to me? Mm-hmm. Okay. The proportion of the square would be equal to the extremes multiplied. Okay. Okay. So, can you exemplify that in numbers? What's the sign of up there? Four is the six, so that's what? Six is the right. Six, yes. Six times six is what? Three is six, yeah. And four times nine is what? Three is six. Three is six. So, four and nine are what? You've got the sides of an oblong, right? Trying to make an oblong and a square, right? So, you're trying to find between four and nine a number that is a what? 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