De Anima (On the Soul)
Lecture 27: Happiness, Fortune, and the Etymologies of Human Flourishing

Transcript
================================================================================

And you know, we speak of, you know, a sight for sore eyes, that's the old saying, right, huh? You know, it's something refreshing about seeing something beautiful, huh? And, uh, I used to know it's like when I'd be in a reading room, and you're reading these pages, and you get kind of tired of reading, you look up, and there's this beautiful painting there, how refreshing it is, look at that beautiful painting, you see? So, uh, I think Thomas Aquinas, to my knowledge, gave him the best understanding, explanation, of the metaphor, sweet, right? So, um, that's a metaphor, right? But the, properly speaking, not metaphorically, right? The form is not sweet, right? Right. Properly speaking here, the heart is not sweet, huh? In the sense of which sweet is the private object, right? Private sensible, the sense of what? Taste, huh? So, shape and magnitude are known just by the sense of sight and the sense of touch. It's interesting that one of the fragments we have of Empedocles, where he's talking about the broadest road that leads into the mind of man, right? He's talking about how we can't see God, right? Or get a hold of him with our hands, which is the broadest road leading into the mind of man, right? He's talking about the road from the senses into reason, right? But in that fragment, he singles out the sense of sight and the sense of, what? Touch, right? And when I talk about those two senses in particular, I say, well, there's a sense of sight and a sense of touch that has some excellence that the other senses don't have. Well, together, they have an excellence the other senses don't have, that they alone seem to know the shape or the form of things. And notice how important form is. So we're using logic on the forms of government, okay? So is the substantial form of the body, right? The forms of fiction. But then, in particular, the sense of sight is important for its, what? Clarity, right? It's knowing things at a distance. But the sense of touch is important for its, what? Sertitude. The doubting Thomas will trust his sense of touch more than sense of sight, right? Unless you put my hand, right, in his side and my fingers in the nails, huh? Maybe we should stop here and we'll come back to this, huh? Sure. Because everybody can't stay now for this. We'll talk again about chapter 6. And then we'll look at what chapter 7 and chapter 11 here. We may get to 12. We won't go beyond that. You know? We won't keep it that far, right? But it's, you know. 7 is mainly about sight. Here's a little bit of chapter 11 in touch. But it's just the end of it, right? We're going to be looking at chapter 12 here for you later on. These areas bring out how sensing, in a way, is an immaterial receiving, in a way, but not as immaterial as understanding will be. But we'll come back to chapter 6 in this distinction here. Talking about the common sensibles. Can I ask you, let's say, the distinction between, like, joy and delight and happiness is there? Well, yeah, but you've got to be careful there because when we use happiness, say, as a translation there, or eudaimonia in Greek, right? Or felicitas in Latin. There it's naming the end or purpose of man, right? Yeah. And it's not naming the joy we have when we reach that end or purpose. Yeah. But I think in English now, the word happy, right, has taken on the sense of joy for it. So happy is sometimes, in English, taken as the opposite of what? Sad, right? But that's using the word happy in a different sense, huh? Yeah. Happy, in a sense, tied up with happiness in Nicomachean Ethics. The opposite of happy would be miserable, richard, right? And, again, richardness there doesn't mean the sadness itself, right? As Thomas says in the Summa Cone Gentiles, you know, to be mistaken is a great part of misery. That's not a kind of sadness, right? The man who's mistaken doesn't always be mistaken, so he's not sad about it. But still, something very bad to be mistaken. Especially about important things. Now, you know, I was always struck by, you know, when I first read Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, of course, I read it in English. And then I read it later in Latin in Thomas' commentary. Finally, I read it in what? In Greek, right? Okay. So, the Greek word was eudaimonia. The Latin word was philicitas. The English, in merbiti, by philicitas in Latin, right? And in English, by happiness, right? So, these were used as synonyms of eudaimonia. Okay? Now, if you examine these three words, though, the etymology, the origin of the word is different, though. Eudaimonia means that you are well-devened. See? A daemon didn't originally have a bad sense, necessarily, in Greek, right? Sure. A daemon is a little more like what you might call an angel or something, in Hebrew, right? So, you could have a good daemon or a bad daemon. Sure. Okay? Like, you speak of a good angel or a bad angel, right? An angel attention. Okay. Felicitas comes from the word philix, meaning fruitful. So, it means, you know, fruitfulness. Okay? Happiness comes from the word hap, which means luck. Okay? Now, if you want to see that original reading of the word hap, it will be etudia no naroda. You'll see what it means, hap. It means luck. Okay? And happy means lucky. Now, what's interesting about those three words, which happen to be used as sentence in that context, right? To name the end or purpose of man, right? But they're taken from three possible clauses, right? Eudaimonia hints at the idea that maybe our happiness depends upon a higher being. Right? Okay? Like that moment with the guy in Socrates, right? Mm-hmm. Okay. Felicitas, right? Fruitfulness, right? Is in some ways the most appropriate word for what Aristotle is doing there. Mm-hmm. Because fruit is something ultimate and sweet, right? But it's a natural result of a plant, right? So you could say that happiness is a natural result of a virtuous feat, right? And in a way, misery, right, is the natural, you might say, result of vicious feat, right? Okay? And you know what Shakespeare says there, in a great play there, Macbeth, when Lady Macbeth can't sleep anymore, and the doctors, like it says, unnatural deeds do breed unnatural troubles. Okay, let's do it. Okay, let's do it. Okay, let's do it. Okay, let's do it. Okay, let's do it. Okay, let's do it. In other words, Lichitaus is emphasizing, you know, that what we do or don't do has as a result, right, happiness or what, misery, right? Instead of emphasizing the necessity of a higher being, right, emphasizing our own what? Why happiness is saying that it depends upon half or luck, right? Okay. Now, as soon as I take the entomology of a few words and say, well, maybe there's an element of truth, right, in all three. Maybe our happiness depends, to some extent, upon what we choose to do or not to, right? So people are happy or miserable because of what they've chosen. There's a lot of truth to that, you know? But people, you know, are to some extent responsible for their own misery, you know, or in a sense responsible for their own, you know, virtue is its only word, right? Meaning, right? Imagine a lot of putting happiness, huh? Like Shakespeare says, you know, he's going to apply that part of philosophy that treats it happiness, right, virtue, especially to be achieved, right? But maybe our happiness also depends, you know, even, you know, at least in this life, right, depends upon what? Some higher being, right? Even the common man, sometimes, say, somebody upstairs likes me or, you know, or someone upstairs doesn't like me or something. But they have the idea that they're being, you know, like Lincoln there, right, you know? They're being guided by somehow, you know, higher power, right? Um, okay? But then, luck seems to have something to do with this, too, right? You know, I mean, you can get in an accident and be crippled for life, you know? That's bad luck, right? Or you can be in the right place, right? You know, or you inherit a piece of property and they discover oil or something, right? Makes life a little bit easier and stuff. So, or you meet the right person, right? You see? We often meet people. There are two, there's this funny story. I first came to Boston. I happened to be in Boston one day. I first came, I keep first came to Syria. So I went down to Boston and kind of, you know, explore the place a bit, see? So I went down and I was kind of wandering around down by the province there, right? And so I was all by myself. So I went into this kind of a fancy tobacco shop there. So I go in there and I got these English over cigarettes. And I was walking around and I spoke in these things. I noticed, you know, probably the only package I was ever bought when I was in here. See, I don't know, here I just got knocked out. So I went around. And I get thirsty, right? So I decided to go into this, I don't know, hotel's there, right? And go to the bar and get a beer. And so I go and I sit down and I order my beer and so on. Some of them myself. Another guy sits down next to me, you know. He's ordering his thing. I noticed he has a book of poetry. So I figured he must be some kind of an academic type, you know. So I struck up a conversation with him and he's a big shot at some Canadian university, right? And he's down taking some course in management, you know, at Harvard, you know, for the semester, right? So we get talking, you know. I get talking some time. And I said, it's a cigarette, I said, you know. He said, I only smoke English ovals, he says. I pulled him out. So before you know it, he's giving me his address. He said, look me up, you know. And so I'm like, I need a job. But I mean, you know, if I need a job, it's like that, you know. But I mean, this is the only time I probably bought cigarettes. He's just, you know, he's trying to do it again. And Amy Schoel was, you know, can I remember these things? And I ran into this guy, right? I guess I found Bulea one time. He's like the son. He's going down to Florida. He's laying on the beach there, you know. And he gets talking just by haphazard by the guy next to him, right? And Bulea was a pretty fascinating character in the fact that, you know. He wanted to hire Bulea, you know. At least some guys in some college, you know. But they didn't want to leave Laval and C. Dionne. But I mean, you know, my brother Mark, you know, was applying for a job when he was leaving Laval, see. He had applied for some job here in the East, you know, rather in the West. And one of the questions they asked him, you know, was he all through with his scolarity, you know. Because sometimes a person has to go back to take more courses, you know. And my brother Mark had said no, and they hadn't read the letter right or something. They thought he still had some more scolarity to do, right? And so in the time in which he was correcting that misimpression from the letter, right, he got another offer from California, right? And, you know, burn the bush is worth two in the hand, right? Excuse me. Burn the hand is worth two in the bush. And so, you know. But if that guy in the other place had not misread the letter, right, and then the delay and the correction, you know, the misreading, right? Yeah. He would have got an offer to go there, and he would have gone there and sent it to California, and he would have met Ron MacArthur and all this. Yeah. Maybe it would not have happened because of this, right? Right. You see? So you can point to, I can point to all kinds of, you know, things that happen to you for good or for bad, right, in your life, huh? You say, well, there's some reason to say that happiness depends, to some extent, upon half or luck, right? You might get a job because you happened to be in the right place at the right time, right? Someone else gets a lousy job, because he was in the right place at the right time, right? Yeah. What about the word beatitudo? What? Saint Thomas, beatitudo. Yeah, well, that's a word used more properly for, you know, in the context of the highest, you see? Happiness, huh? Oh, yeah. And Aristotle has a word like that, right? Okay. Makaria, son. Oh, okay. The highlands of the West, right? Okay. But these two words here are kind of checking my mind, because this is the word used in American ethics, right? This is the word that they translated for in Thomas' commentary, and this is the English word, right? But now, if you go to Aristotle's Poetics, right, and he makes a famous saying, you know, that the play is about happiness and misery, right? That tragedy is more, you know, and comedy is more, you know, going towards misery, right? And comedy is more, you know, going in the first direction. The easy word happiness here in the English translation, probably, but the Greek word is eutokia. Good luck. Aristotle uses a different word for happiness in the Poetics and in the what? And it knows the emphasis there, right? You go back to Shakespeare now. He's the master here. You know, when Romeo goes out there and tries to stop a fight between Mapushio and Tybalt, he's hiddenly or secretly married Juliet, right? And so he wants to, you know, unite the two families, right? So he wants to stop a fight between Tybalt and Mapushio. And the accidental result of his trying to stop the fight is that Mapushio gets what? Gets killed. And Romeo loses his head and he strikes Tybalt and then gets banished and all the rest of it. But he says, I am fortune's what? Fool. As if fortune is a determining thing in his happiness or misery, right? He was fortunate to meet Juliet that night, right? He didn't go there for the sake of meeting Juliet, did he? He went there for the sake of seeing Rosalind, right? So this great happiness of Juliet, right, seemed to be a result of what? Good luck, right? And now this misery of his vanishment of what? Bad luck, right? Well, of course, things could turn out good if Friar Lawrence's plan worked, right? But he sends a friar to Romeo to tell him that Juliet has not really died, but she's taken this potion he's given her, right? And he should come at a certain time, you know, to wait when she wakes up, right? Well, what happens is that the Friar gets what? By bad luck, right? Right. Gets delayed, right? Right. You know? He's going to a town where there's a plague or something, you know, and he goes in to see somebody who's dying. He's going to a town where there's a plague or something, you know, and he goes in to see somebody who's dying, and he goes in to see somebody who's dying, and he goes in to see somebody who's dying, and he goes in to see somebody who's dying, and he goes in to see somebody who's dying, and he goes in to see somebody who's dying, and he goes in to see somebody who's dying, and he goes in to see somebody who's dying, and he goes in to see somebody who's dying, and he goes in to see somebody who's dying, and he goes in to see somebody who's dying, and he goes in to see somebody who's dying, and he goes in to see somebody who's dying, and he goes in to see somebody who's dying, and he goes in to see somebody who's dying, and he goes in to see somebody who's dying, and he goes in to see somebody who's dying, and he goes in to see somebody who's dying, and he goes in to see like that, and then they weren't at the house like they didn't stay, and he can't get to Romeo, right? So, by bad luck, the messenger to Romeo, that would have made everything fine, right? So, the emphasis in the play, much more maybe in real life, is to give a great role to what? To fortune or luck. And so, it's interesting that there's not usually the word you took here there in the poetics, which corresponds etymologically to happiness, right? Now, in Latin, sometimes, instead of licitaus, we'll speak of bona fortuna, as being happiness, bona fortuna. And that's exactly like these words, right? And sometimes we say about somebody in life, you know, we say he's been fortunate, you know, in life. Or someone else who's miserable or rich, we say he's been unfortunate in life, right? Don't say we're using one for being happiness and miserable, but it's being named for fortune, right? I don't know the reason for it, but although we can speak of good luck and bad luck, right? It's funny that we use the word lucky for meaning good luck, and unlucky for bad luck, right? The same way with fortune, you know, if you say you're fortunate, we think that it's by good fortune. If it's unfortunate, it's by bad, right? So it's interesting, huh? And that the poets emphasize very much the role of fortune, huh? So Aristotle uses that word there, right? But there's some truth to that, right? And there's some truth that happiness depends, you know, Aristotle says himself about a higher being, right? Now, see, in ethics, in ethics, in a way it features us, it's the best, in a sense, because, you know, we have, we're being taught in the ethics here, you know, not how to make God of the higher beings, right, favorable towards us, or how to control fortune, because you can't control that, right? But how, by what you do or don't do, you can become happy on this point. I mean, Aristotle, you know, he's nuanced, right? Because he'll take up what Soden said, call no man happy until he be dead, right? You don't know what turn of fortune he made him to go, you know, and it puts money to seem happy at one time, but God said all the things in, you know, for fortune of things to happen, you know? And, you know, Shakespeare emphasizes that in the terrible play there, Titus and Herodotus, right? That disgusting play is what they say. I mean, this idea that happiness, you know, when you come back in battle, right, and some of the sons of Titus, you know, died for us in battle, right? And they're assured of their happiness because they've died largely, right? Those who've been, come home, successful, and they've still got some other life to lead, right? And you know, it's going to happen to me. It's ever some misfortune. Of course they do in a horrible play, you know, it's terrible things that happen there. It's just disgusting, but anyway. But I mean, you know, they're touching upon that idea, you know, in a very exaggerated form, in a soul instead, right? So, if you use the word happiness, which is the English word we really have, you've got to realize that entomology originally, you know, was pointing to one thing, but it's not. Entomology, the word's not the meaning of the word. When we use it in the ethics, or Shakespeare's using the ethics in Titus Shrew, happiness there means the end, the purpose of man, right? Yeah. He says ethics, you know, he's applying that part of philosophy that speaks of happiness by virtue, especially to be achieved. That's more the entomology of philicitas than happiness, right? Yeah, right. And that's saying the piece of happiness by good luck, especially to be achieved, but by virtue, right? Yeah, that's right. So you could say that philicitas is the natural result of virtuous deeds, right? Yeah, right. In a sense, if you can use the word natural, though, no one says unnatural. But unnatural needs to breed unnatural troubles, right? There's something kind of natural about that, right? Yeah. Like joy and delight, like God has, you know, God even... Well, you see, if you achieve or gain the end of man, right? Yeah. Then you will find that pleasant, you'll be joyful, right? Yeah. Because that's what you wanted most of all. So when you get what you want most of all, this is how will I have that result of joyful, right? Of joy. But that doesn't mean that the end is joy. Yeah. That's something that naturally accompanies it, right? And so people get mixed up there. Right. It's because joy accompanies happiness, right? Yeah. They think that they're the same thing. And so happy then came to mean what? Joyful, right? Yeah. So happy, you know, you're just using the formula of dialectic there, right? If a word has more than one opposite, there's more than one meaning, right? See? So nowadays people usually think of happy as the opposite of what? Sad. Happy days, sad days. Okay? But happy and miserable, to use the Latin word, or wretched, to use the native English word, right? Right? Happy as opposed to miserable or wretched is a different meaning than happy as opposed to sad. And when you use the word happiness to name the end of man, that's, you know, this is denomative from happiness in this sense, huh? Happiness here doesn't mean joy. Happiness is defined, you know, you first draw the line on happiness that it's man's own act, right? Done well throughout life, huh? It's a woman's own act according to virtue. But people have kind of, you know, it's kind of lost its own meaning in this one here, right? Yeah. But, etymologically, happy originally means, means, what, lucky, huh? If you want to see that original use of the word there, you can go back, let's say, to the two gentlemen of Romey, you can see that in the beginning and the end of the play. You meet with good happiness, you know? Wishing particular happiness and so on. Uh-huh. To gentlemen of Romey. And then later on, you know, the end there, you see what has happened, right? You see, it's just the word happiness. So, it is joy and delight would be more properly synonyms than happy or something. Well, as they say, the word happiness now might have taken on its other meaning, right? Yeah. Sooner the word happy is taken on a sense of joyful, right? Yeah. But that's not the happy that is, um, that is a denomative from happiness. Yeah. As the, using the ethics, you know, in the translation. See, there's that. The other thing I was looking at last time I talked to you, I asked you about purity, and I went through that a little bit. Yeah. One more thing here. Okay. The word happiness, you know, has been very much degraded in meaning in English, right? Yeah. You know, so when Einstein talks about happiness, that's for the beast, you know? Oh, yeah. You know, it's sort of the thing, happiness is content, or something like that, you know? Yeah, right. The cat purring there, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And having no higher life than eating and sleeping, you know? Right. You know, the cat's sleeping there contentedly, you know? The cat's happy. Right, right, right. I mean, that's for peace, Einstein says, right? Uh-huh. See? And you have that, you know, starting with Kant, too, you know, Kant is kind of a false understanding of happiness. It's just, uh, so you've got to be a problem there with, you know, people's understanding. Yeah, that's actually how the question first came up, because I read somewhere someone was talking about their impression of a certain religious order, and they were talking about how they wouldn't describe the men as happy, but joyous, and they kind of made this distinction, and it seemed to be a false kind of thing, based on it. Yeah. But sometimes they use the word happiness, they say, sometimes it's just for a, it's kind of a mindless intentment, you know? Yeah. Um, you know, the, the wall of security. I know St. Thomas uses the term, but it doesn't use puritas, but pruditia, which would be more from pudo, like shame. So it seems like our sense of using it is more from English, to use the term purity. But it still seems that it follows the same reasoning as you brought out last time, about something higher than the shameful, than the base. I thought that was kind of curious that he uses that word, so he really doesn't use the word purity. Well, I mean, he uses the word pure. I mean, all up to God. God is a pure act, right? Yeah. But if you say, why is one virtue in particular called purity, right? Right. Well, it's because of the fact that these sensible pleasures, right, most of all kind of contaminate the soul, right? Right. They drown reason, shall we say, right? Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's interesting, you know, how Shakespeare, you know, metaphorically, you know, he'll call, you know, type wrath and love. Like in, as you like it, right? They're in the very wrath of love. Said about, what's his name? Not Erlone LeBron, one of those brothers there. One of the other. Oliver, yeah. Oliver and, what's your name, the cousin's name. But he said, they're in the very wrath of love. Clubs cannot part them. Oh. See? Well, see, when two dogs are fighting, you know, the only way to set up there is a club, right? Well, the man and women are so attracted to each other, you've got to, you've got to, you've got to, you've got to, you've got to, you've got to get them married right away. See? But notice the expression there. They're in the very wrath of love, huh? And that's kind of a funny metaphor in a sense, right? But it's because lust, you might say, and anger are very, what, strong emotions, right? And very much needing to be, what, moderated, right? So when Thomas, you know, in the Sun Theologiae, he takes up, you know, the four cardinal virtues. And then he takes up the other virtues that have resemblance to them. So, for example, mildness, which moderates anger, is put with temperance, right? Because they have a similarity there, right? You know, you have a strong passion, right? Strong emotion that needs to be, what, restrained, you know? That's kind of interesting, the way the word there, because, you know, the word, to moderate, one of the words is temperance, right? And people don't understand what you're saying there. So when somebody gets angry, they say, you know, temper, temper, you know? But the original meaning of temperance was, you know, that, you know, moderate your anger, right? But now temperance means what? The anger, you know? You know? And that's what it meant, right? Is it? You know? And in other words, they confuse the moderation of it with the excessive self. It's like here, they're confusing, you know, the end with the natural result of the end, right? Yeah, okay. It's actually connected with the wreck. Yeah. Yeah, it's connected with the idea of shipwreck. Oh. See? And that's, you know, I mentioned that thing in the Roman, right? He speaks of himself as a sea captain, right? But, you know, you often find that metaphor in the poet's sound, you know, that the life is a voyage, right? Sure. And you're trying to reach port. Especially in those days, ships didn't reach port, right? Sure. So it's a better metaphor. In those days, you know, when you would go off, you heard about the insurance, right? They'd bet upon whether you'd come back or not. If you got it back, you'd collect the money, right? If you didn't come back, then they'd get the money that you had. It went into the pot. So, I bet you don't get back, see? You put up $100, you put up $100. And somebody keeps the $200, right? And if you get back alive, you get the $200. If you get back alive, I collect the $200. So I'm betting against you're coming back. It's a dangerous thing, you know. It's a dangerous thing. Kind of a funny insurance thing. So Shakespeare often speaks of life's a certain voyage, right? It's a good metaphor. It comes up a lot of church documents, too. The ways are similar to this world, right? And they consider true to this world. That's why we're in the Gospel of St. John there, right? The fish are put up on the shore. It's at the end when they're off, out of the tunnel to the world. I don't know what the rank of it. The other one reminds me of that. I try to talk to these animals, but it's kind of hard to. I'll be full of my animals. If Pirachi does zero, it'll be fine. Thank you. You know, Conrad Lorenz, he could do the sounds really good. Oh, yeah. He knew what the different one meant. You know, in a boat, trying to make a documentary. So he was trying to get the ducks, I guess, or something to come. And so he was talking and making the sound, you know. And the man was with him and says, no, no, these are ducks, you're talking goose. They say cats, you know, have different meows and different things, you know, but they don't necessarily discriminate all their subtleties. Yeah, but Conrad Lorenz, he could hear all those birds. Some meant, like, come on, birds, you know, never come. Some meant danger. He could hear them and make all those different things. Oh, right. But the Indians did it, too. You know, the Indians used to use these sounds, too, to communicate, to be known to other people. Father Grishel mentioned how his father used to kind of have an idea of insurance or something that would kind of help you. Father Grishel would go on a plane, and he used to be able to take plane insurance or something. And his dad used to say, do you really feel safe flying without insurance? Doesn't make any safer at all. If you were talking to a friend there, you know, had some interest in philosophy, you know, and just when you start with that idea, you know, I see you, you know, and I see your shape, you know, they don't see a difference in those things, you know. In daily life, you know, it's confused, right? Mm-hmm. You see? The real, you really think out that distinction, right? The average person hasn't really thought that distinction. They don't really distinguish between the way that they see you when they see your color or your shape, or between the way they see your color and the way they see your shape. Yeah. You know what? You know, I was quoting these things there. It's very important. It's very important. It's very important. It's very important. It's very important. It's very important. It's very important. Actual and not potential, huh? Now he's going to explain a bit what he means there by the transparent, and when the transparent is what? Actually transparent, and when it's only what? Able to be. Able to be, right? Okay. So when there's light in the transparent, right? Then the transparent is actually transparent. You can see through it, huh? But when it's dark, right, then you can't see through, right? I can see the color of the bricks over there, right? And they move the, what, transparent here all the way to my eyes, but the transparent in act, the transparent that has been illuminated, by the lights of the sun or by the artificial lights here, okay? And this, he says, is the nature of it. This is the nature of what? Color, right, huh? The fusi sun, okay? So because it's a mover of the transparent in act, this is the reason why he goes on to say that the visible is not without, what? Light, right? But every color of each thing is seen in light. So therefore you've got to take up what light is and what the transparent is to understand better what color is, right? It's the nature of color to move the transparent in act, and the transparent is an act through, what? Light, he says, huh? Okay? Whence one must say first about light what it is, huh? Okay? At the same time he's going to be talking about the transparent, huh? Now sometimes Thomas, and himself especially, but maybe even Aristotle sometimes, will speak a little differently than he does here about light and color. And Thomas in many places, if you go through the different places where he talks about light, he sees light sometimes, or rather color, as being a kind of a partaking of light, huh? Okay? But here he's not emphasizing that if he thinks that, so he has doubted that. He's seeing light as what makes the transparent actually transparent, so that the color can get to your eye, so to speak, right? Through the transparent, huh? Okay? So 190 he begins to speak a bit about the transparent, huh? There is then something transparent. I call the transparent what is visible, not in virtue of itself visible, as if speaking simply, but through an extraneous color. Myself, I often speak of the transparent as what you can see through, right? Okay? And in that regard, sometimes we speak of color as being the end or the limit of the transparent, because the colors that we see, like the red there in the bricks or the black in your gown, is at the end of the transparent air between my eye and what? Your cloth, right? Or between my eye and the bricks, huh? Okay? I have a colleague, you know, who's taken up with the modern doubts about the senses and so on, and you know how the moderns want to say that we don't see or sense anything outside of ourselves, right? We're only sensing the, what, effect of these things upon us, right? Maybe an effect that we, in some magical way, manipulate, right? And so sometimes I'll say to him, well, where is the color that you see? See, is it up here, the color that you see? Or is it out there, right? Of course, he wants to say that the color that you see is up here. He really isn't out there at all. That's kind of a common thing with the modern philosophers. Sundays and Greeks are in that a little bit too, but not as, you know, chronically addicted to that way of thinking as the modern philosophers are. But isn't it a matter of our experience that the color you see is at the end of the transparent? There's always a transparent between your eye and the color that you see. So in that way, the color seems to be, what? Outside the eye, right? Yeah, yeah. The thing that kind of convinces me that the color, in a way, is out there too is the fact that we know, what? The shapes of bodies through, what? Color. So I know the shape of the bricks over there, right? Or the shape of the table over there, huh? Mm-hmm. The shape of the hat, huh? Through color, right? And it's pretty hard to deny that the shapes of, what? Bodies are in the bodies outside of us, huh? Mm-hmm. Maybe you've seen these things that they have for children. I know we had one for my children when they were little. It's kind of a plastic box. A cube, the shape of a cube. And it's got six sides the cube has, but they're plastic. And there are holes cut in all six sides. And some holes are round and some are triangular and so on. Some are more square and so on. And one of these six sides opens up like a lid. You can close it or open it up. And you have these little blocks inside there like a circular one and maybe a triangular one and so on. And I suppose it's kind of a learning toy for the child because they want to take these things out and put them through the side walls. They've got to put the round thing, so to speak, through the round hole and the triangular one through that one. I always joke about my colleague who's taken up with the moderns there. He had a great illumination one time, you know, that the senses, you know, are deceiving us and so on. But I was going to buy him one of these things, right? And as Charles DeConnick says, a man has never worked with his hands, you know, he won't understand philosophy. And if you have to, you know, if you try to put the round one into the triangular hole, it won't go through, right? It gets pretty hard to deny that the shapes are really in these objects. And so, he points out how the transparent is found in many things, right? It's not one kind of thing. And so he says air and water, right? In many of the cells, like we'd say the glass now would be transparent, huh? Air is more transparent than the water. But it's not as air that is transparent, or water. He goes as air. What's the reason why I said it was transparent than water would not be transparent, huh? So it seems to be a more common property, right, of these, huh? But they are transparent because there is some nature present. The same in both of these and in the eternal body above, huh? And he's referring above to the stars, right? But not the stars themselves, but the, what? What's carrying the stars, right? Okay? The spheres that the ancients thought, huh? That you can see through, right? To see the stars, huh? So the transparent is something found in air and water and glass and even in these more, what? Heavenly things, right? Okay? Now, how does Aristotle think of light in comparison to the transparent? Well, he's imagining, huh? The transparent to be, as it were, the subject of light, huh? As that in which, right, either light or it's contrary, but really he goes on to say contrary in the sense of the light, right? Okay? Like form is in what? Matter, right, huh? Okay? Just like a piece of clay, let's say it's shaped in the shape of a sphere, and you can mold it into the shape of a cube, right? So his word, the transparent, is that in which there can be light, or there can be a lack of light, and then it is what? Dark, huh? Okay? So he's speaking of light as if it were the act or the form. So he's speaking of light as if he's speaking of light as if he's speaking of light as if he's speaking of light as if he's speaking of light as if he's speaking of light as if he's speaking of light as if he's speaking of light as if he's speaking of light as if he's speaking of light as if he's speaking of light as if he's speaking of light as if he's speaking of light as if he's speaking of light as if he's speaking of light as if he's speaking of light as if he's speaking of light as if he's speaking of light as if he's speaking of light as if he's speaking of light as if he's speaking of light as if he's speaking of light as if he's speaking of light as if he's speaking of light as if he's speaking of light as if he's speaking of light as if he's speaking of light as if he's speaking of light as if he's speaking of light as if he's speaking of light as if he's speaking of light as if he's speaking