De Anima (On the Soul)
Lecture 30: Sensory Reception and the Immateriality of Knowing

Transcript
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In chapter 12, he's going through the five outward senses. He's going to say some things about sensing in general and about the senses. He could be a little more explicit about these things, but Thomas in his commentary expands upon this. He's going to reveal the fact that there's a kind of immateriality in sensing, even though the senses have a material organ. He says, One must grasp generally about all sense, that sense is what is receptive of the sensible species without the matter. That makes an interesting comparison. As the wax receives the sign of the signet ring. That's a very common thing. You have a signet ring made out of iron or gold and you would melt the wax and stamp it, right? Okay, so the wax receives the form, right? Without the what? Matter, right? It takes the golden or the brazen sign, but not as gold or bronze. Similarly, the sense of each suffers by what has color or flavor or sound, but not insofar as each of these is named, but insofar as is of such a sort and according to its account, according to its form. It's kind of a reception without matter there, huh? Okay? Now, as Thomas puts on the commentary, you've got to expand upon this a bit, because there's a way in which matter always receives form and not matter. You know, if you're making cookies there at Christmas time and you've got these little cookie things here, so you can stamp out in the dough Christmas trees and circular things and so on, right? Okay? So the dough receives the shape of the metal without receiving the metal, right? But that's not sensing, is it? Okay? And that's what I was kind of hitting here at. The fact that the senses are receiving not only the form without the matter, the form without the matter but in a different way than what it was in the matter to begin with then okay now sometimes we contrast what you might call material reception with the reception in knowing around this is the way we contrast when we say that the material reception you are receiving the form of another when we say form you don't mean just the shape right but something that is uh formal right receiving the form of another as one's own while losing the form one had okay so in that slab of marble right but not going to go saw in a marketplace i guess i'm going to catch all that someday he made the pietas i guess out of it right okay well the pietas received the shape of a woman and her son right so it became now the shape of the marble right and whatever shape the marble had before he put that shape into it that irregular shape it had it what lost that shape right okay we had a block of wood here it has some kind of a shape huh it might be an unnamed shape as saristala said before about something but it has some kind of shape right but now if the artist says i want to make a a statue here of uh thomas here right and he cars it out right and well then the wood would now receive the shape of the shape of thomas as its own shape right and would lose the shape it had okay and that's why we call this reception matter a kind of alteration right then because you're losing one form right to gain another one okay now is that the way your eye or my eye receives the shape of thomas if i remember him when i go home tonight i've got his shape in my memory right so i have received the form of another right but have i received in my eye the form of thomas as now the form of my eye or some other part of me like some bone or flesh inside me right receive the form of thomas as its own form one of the big philosophers sitting there looking in somebody's eyes right and you can see your own shape in there right as if that's what it is that's what receiving is uh it's a little bit like you know the mirror right so receiving the form of another not as your own but as what other right and this is the first difference between the material receiving and the receiving and knowing receiving the form of another not as your own form now right but as the form of what while keeping the form one half that seems to be the difference that the non-living thing their material thing or here in the non-sensing i should say the non-knowing thing it can receive the form of another huh only by what losing the form it what have right and acquiring the form of another as its own form now by knowing this is true the more higher knowing is you're receiving the form of another as other huh it doesn't become your form and you keep performing so when we define for example things huh you know our reason is receiving the what the natures of these things huh but do they become the nature of the reason itself when reason understands what a dog is that the reason becomes a dog but it has you might say what we see the nature of the dog itself right it's grasped the nature of the dog right and just so when i grasp the chalk the chalk is contained in my hand right so when the reason grasps the nature of the dog which it does to some extent yeah the irascible animal they're right huh just an incident on the paper there today they're about this pit bull you know and these crazy animals you know and it bit the woman and the kid jumped up in the car and then the policeman got it down it's all he fell but the dog was eating through his his vest everything so finally he killed the dog but there so we know something about these animals right there's something irascible right yeah but um but you become a pit bull when you receive the nature of the pit bull into your mind you know and there's something in the nature of that thing i have something in the nature of the pit bull in my mind my mind lost its gentility it's a calmness so receiving huh the form of the natures of other things right while retaining your own nature your own form there's a kind of immaterial reception huh they call it immaterial because it's not of this kind that we just find in matter all the time so if you think of the way in which um the artist receives the shape of the person he's painting or drawing a statue making a statue of in his eye right and the way in the wood or the marble or whatever it is he's making the statue in clay it could be right is the clay in the artist's eye receiving the shape of the victim the shape of the person being painted or the person being uh sculpted uh in the same way this seems to be the what the difference here that aristotle is hinting at right okay that's receiving the form without matter and not in the way that matter receives but aristotle wants to go on to point out that this reception is not entirely but immaterial in the case of the senses because there are bodily organs that you also receive in this other way okay now go back to the example there of the sense of touch which he i mean why is he included there um why do i feel the warmth of the water when i go into the shower at first more right and then after i'm in the shower for a while i might even turn the water on hotter right as if i'm not feeling the heat as much right but it's because i've been receiving to some extent the warmth of the water as the warmth now of my own body see it takes a little bit of time for that warmth of the water to become the warmth of my own what my own body right and insofar as i receive the warmth of the water as my own warmth right then i don't seem to uh to know it so much right as if there's not There's an opposition between receiving the warmth of the water as the warmth of my own body and knowing it to be warm water, right? In the same way, the example that I gave the ocean there, my wife's cousin, you know, he'd do some manual work in the summer and then he would come home and he had a, you know, one of these snorkel devices, you know, for breathing underwater, and he had a pool. So he'd come home, it was all hot, you know, up and down in the sun all day, something like that. But he jumped down to the bottom of the pool with a snorkel device, he could breathe, right? And he'd stay down there, I don't know, 15, 20 minutes, right? But it really brings your body temperature, what, down, see? And then he'd come up and he's, you know, internal cooling system, right? So, he'd have a pool, he'd have a struggle to do that, obviously. So, but notice, you've got to feel the cold of the water first more when you jump in, right? Just like I was saying in the ocean there, huh? And then you have to adjust a bit to the, what, coldness. At least, I can't just, like, build a little fresh rain, you know, that's enough. You know, I've got to hit my midriff and up about here, and then I can try to, you know, start swimming in the water. But I feel the coldness of the water more. I know the coldness of the water, right? More when I first, what, get in there, right? That first shock of the water goes against you, huh? I used to go swimming in the lakes there in the Twin Cities with my friend Roy, you know, and he would get in there. And he'd say, these kids like to splash you when you first come in. He'd say, you splashed, but he says, I'll hold your head in the water. But it is kind of a shock the first time, right, huh? You see, the water is kind of a, you know, a shock to the body, right? But you're feeling the coldness, huh? But as it becomes somewhat the temperature of your body, then you don't know it so much, do you? You see? So that opposition between the material reception and the, what, reception of knowing, huh, is seen in that example. So far as you receive it as your own, you don't know it so much anymore, right? But it takes some time for that guy into the water there, you know, when he comes home from his working outdoors to, for his body to take on the temperature of the water as his own temperature. That's kind of the expansion there upon, Aristotle's touching upon there, to 57. Now, in 258, he's simply distinguishing between the organ, which is the body, and the power itself, which is like the form, right? And we talked about that before when we were talking about the soul itself. But now, in 259, he wants to point out that the senses, nevertheless, are bodies, and they do receive this other way, and they can be, what? What? Corrupted, right? By, what? The excess of their object, huh? So if the sound is too loud, it can, what? Injure the ear and make it death. I don't like these young kids, they say, you know, rock music and so on, and rock conscious, their hearing is being affected by this, right? And, you know, these guys who work with machinery, too, you know, they can, I worked in the factory sometimes when I was in high school, and these guys are like, bang, bang, oh, it hit in my ears. How can the guy stand it? Well, you don't realize the guy is deaf now, because he doesn't hear these sounds anymore, right? He's killed his thing there, huh? And the reason for that, as he says, is that the sense of power is a certain, what, ratio or proportion, and it's, what, that's disturbed, huh? Just like you, you know, pull the strings and the violin too hard, or pluck them too hard, and it gets out of, what, tune, right? So the senses are acted upon in the way that matter is acted upon, too. It appears, however, from these considerations, why the excesses of the sensibles sometimes destroy the sense organs. For if the motion be more powerful than the sense organ, it dissolves the ratio, the proportion there. But this was the sense, huh? This was the sense of power. Just as striking the chord strongly in the musical instrument there, the concord and tone are destroyed. And he kind of touches upon why the plants don't have the, what, ability to sense. They don't have that definite, what, ratio or proportion, huh? What is exactly, is the ratio in the senses, like, what is the meaning of the ratio of the matter, or? Well, that's at the form, right? You see, the Pythagoreans said that the soul is the harmony of the body, right? And they argued from the principle that like is the cause of love, right? So if the soul delights in that which is harmonious, like in beautiful sounds or beautiful pictures, right? That's because the soul itself is a harmony. Now, Aristotle doesn't think of the soul as being the harmony of the body. We saw before what he thought the soul was. But he sees that as having truth about the, what, sense organs themselves, right? Because the sense organs themselves have a certain harmony or proportion, they delight in what? Is harmonious, huh? It is well proportioned. So the sense organ isn't proportioned to handle the sensible? No, he's saying that because the sense organ has a certain, what, harmony of parts, right? A certain ratio and proportion of parts, right? Mm-hmm. And it delights in what is beautiful, right? The eyes and the ears, huh? Because they are, well, what? They are like the sense organs. And likeness is a cause of love, huh? Now, you have something like that, even the things where you don't speak of the beautiful. You know, like when you buy a German wine, right? You should look on the bottle that says mit Pradeklaut, at least, right? That's kind of the threshold there. Because it doesn't say mit Pradeklaut in there. It's probably sickeningly sweet. But the one mit Pradeklaut is there's kind of a balance there, right? The ratio of the sweet and the acid and so on. And it's much more, what, refreshing and not sickeningly sweet, huh? So the sense is delight, right? In that, huh? Unless they've been destroyed by hot peppers and everything. You see. But, you know, I went to a Chinese restaurant with my wife, you know, and ordering individual meals at that time. And I said, I think I'll try one of these hot ones just to see. And after about four or five bites, you know, I've been, just a burning sensation in my mouth. You know, you couldn't even enjoy the rest of the meal because your sense organ was at least temporarily destroyed. But, you know, they say, you know, that men are more apt, women, you know, to put a lot of seasoning on their food, you know, more salt, more pepper, more whatever it is on the thing and more muscular it is, so that men's sense organs, you know, sense of taste and smell and so on, are more, what, dulled, you know. And, you know, say women are better at smelling, you know, things and tasting them, right, than a man is because the men have kind of burned out their sense organs, you know. Our bedroom is near where the garden is, you know, and he says, oh, can you smell this? It's just coming in. I'm trying to smell it. You know, that's such and such flowers out there, as he says, you know. As a kid, you know, you ever get these things like the Kuwait, you eat that straight, the Kuwait, you know, stuff or those sour things, you know, sour beans or something, you know. You burn your senses out, right, well. So, I was still saying that the senses involve some kind of a harmony or racial proportion, right, and therefore they naturally delight in what is well-proportioned, especially, as I say, in the arts of the beautiful, right, in the senses of the beautiful, senses, sight and hearing, but nevertheless you find it also in a way with the, what, lower senses, like in that, you know, good-tasting food, right? Give me some balance there. It's pleasing to the senses. It's pleasing to the senses. It's pleasing to the senses. It's pleasing to the senses. It's pleasing to the senses. It's pleasing to the senses. It's pleasing to the senses. It's pleasing to the senses. Now, the last part of chapter 12 is taken up with a discussion here of whether the objects of the senses act upon things that don't sense. With the possible exception of those ones like hot and cold and wet and dry, right? Which are qualities of body as such. Herstal seems to say that the other ones, as sensible, don't act upon their object, right? So, if sound knocks out the door, it's not as sound, but as wind or air or something, right? Okay, but not as sound, but that's fairly tangentially what you want to see here, right? So, as others, it seems like there's maybe different senses of that expression, as others. Yeah. But you're receiving the form, so somehow you are receiving a form. Yeah, yeah. And there's no way you say that, right? Just like you sometimes will say that knowing is an alteration, but if you say that, you've got to say it's in a different sense, right? So, you are receiving the form of others, so in some way you're going to say later on in book 3 that the soul is in some way all things. Because by senses, right, it's all sensible things, and by reason it's all understandable things. So in some way it does receive, right, the natures of all things, or the forms of all things. But they don't become, right, an actual form of the thing. It's kind of a serious thing, but you know it's coming down to it. It's a very, very, very wonderful thing, right? It's kind of anticipation what you're going to find with reason, because reason is going to be something altogether immaterial. Reason doesn't have a, what? Deceptor. Yeah, it doesn't have a body, yeah, doesn't have an organ. And Aristotle would point to this difference, you know, to what you have here. That when you consider something very understandable, you're not able less to understand other things. You can understand other things even, what? Better, right? But if you taste something very strong, right, in flavor, it prevents you from tasting other things temporarily. See, if you have a bright light shining, you face it kind of temporarily, what, blinded to look around. And so that difference is a sign of the fact that reason is not a body, but the senses are what bodies, right? And therefore they are temporarily affected or even they can be destroyed by too strong an object, but not the, what, reason, huh? I happened to be looking at Thomas' fourth book of the Summa Contra Gentile before I came down here last day or so. And I'm up in the part now where Thomas is, in the fourth book, he's talking about the Trinity, right? And he's showing from Sacred Scripture, right, the truth about the Word of God, the Son of God. And he's refuting, you know, Photinus and Sibelius and especially the most formidable opponent there is Arius, right? And then he gets through showing, you know, the Scripture is really teaching us what the Church teaches, right? And answering the objections, you know, sometimes that Photinus or Arius, you know, give. Then he starts to give, are things drawn kind of from reason that create difficulties about these things, huh? And of course, one of the difficulties is that God the Son receives the divine nature from God the Father. And then the objection says, well, the receiver and the received are not, what, the same thing, right? So if God the Son receives the divine nature, there'd be some kind of composition in God the Son. And of course, God is altogether simple, so then he can't be God, right? Okay. So you have to understand in what way the Son receives the divine nature from the Father. And it's much more difficult and much more profound than any of the kinds of deception we're talking about here. Yeah. And the first thing you have to understand is the way that matter receives, okay? And especially that receiving that is suffering, right? That's undergoing, right? And then you have to understand the way that, what? The senses receive, right? And that's harder to understand, see? And then the way that reason receives, right? Yeah. And then you have to understand the way that the Son is going to be able to understand the way that the Son is going to be able to understand the Son is going to be able to understand the Son is going to be able to understand the Son is going to be able to understand the Son is going to be able to understand the Son is going to be able to understand the Son is going to be able to understand the Son is going to be able to understand the Son is going to be able to understand the Son is going to be able to understand the Son is going to be able to understand the Son is going to be able to understand the Son is going to be able to understand the Son is going to be able to understand the Son is going to be able to understand the Son is going to be able to understand the Son is going to be able to understand the Son is going to be able to understand the Son is going to be able to understand the Son is going to be able to understand the Son is going to be able to understand the Son is going to be able to understand the Son But then we understand the sense in which God, the Son, receives the divine nature. That's even more difficult to understand. So I've been exercising my mind, you might say, on this. I said, how it answers objection, right? And of course, Thomas, you know, answers it in chapter 14, right? Okay. Now things you do, that stuff there and again, it's really kind of easy, you know, compared to this stuff. You see? But in other words, in thinking about something much more understandable and much more profound, I'm not, what, incapacitated to think about these things. I can now think more easily about these things, you know? But in the case of the senses, you see, if I eat something hot and spicy and so on, then I can't, what? Yeah, yeah. If you have pizza with pepperoni, you know? You know, you don't want to have carbonated sauvignon because you can't even do justice to the wine. It's kind of overcoming all that pepperoni hotness, right? And if you're having, you know, pastrami with mustard on it, you know, you don't have a good red wine with that because it's just overpowered by the spice of the, you know, the real mustard I'm talking about, not this French stuff, you know? The real stuff, you know? The gravy stuff, you know, from Dijon, right? And, but, you can't drink a beer or something, you know, but you can't drink a fine red wine, you're just going to waste your money on it because you can't taste it because your tongue has been destroyed temporarily. And, but I say, when I think about a tuna tank, I come back and think about this stuff, it's easier, you know? It's like some students at TAC would, see, in mathematics, right? You go on to the more difficult things in math, and you find these freshmen, you know, they're, you know, trying to understand Euclid, you know, and, oh, that's so easy, you know, that's so simple, you know? But because you go on to something much more difficult to understand, even in mathematics, right? The earliest theorems seem very, what, easy and facile, right? So you can understand the lesser things, even more so. I see that sometimes, you know, in these great minds like Charles de Connick and Monsignor Dion and so on, these great philosophers, they usually have pretty good judgment in fiction or in music, right? And music is not as understandable as philosophy, but to a man who's understood these things that are more understandable, he can see better, right, what makes sense in music than someone who hasn't. And you can kind of judge a man unless he's just totally lacking experience, right? I mean, if you find a philosopher, say, whose avocation is jazz rather than Mozart, you know there's something wrong with the guy. You know? What did you say, by the way, the first kind of reception was before senses? Well, material reception, see? Oh, yeah, like imprint on the senses. Yeah, and we kind of understand better material reception. It's easier for us to understand, no? Yeah. I was just saying it's more difficult to understand this here, right? Yeah. And then you go and talk about, you know, reception there. In the Trinity, this is, you know, very understandable, but not to us, right? Yeah. So we have an object that is very understandable, but thinking about those things, we don't find it coming back to these lesser things. They were impeded from understanding them, but they seem now kind of easy and relatively easy, right? But that's not true about the senses, see? You hear something very strong, or you hear something very loud, and you're kind of, what, impeded from hearing other things. That's because of the material face of the senses. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's a sign that the senses are material, but that the reason is altogether immaterial. Yeah. You know, we've warned a lot of times, like Reverend Father, you mentioned, that people are real hot not to go into the cold shower, because, you know, people have died from the shock of the system. Yeah, yeah. Now, is this damage done? For instance, like, could we listen to louder rock music if we proportion our ears to it? Is that causing the damage, the shock, or is it just this level of capacity we can't handle? Do you understand? Well, I mean, the problem with the kids there is that the music they're hearing is too loud, right? They play the thing too loud, right? Mm-hmm. You hear these guys driving down the street sometimes, you know, and it's annoying everybody in the place, you know, it's just blaring. It blocks away. You know, but if the guy's inside a car there, you can imagine what he's doing to his ear, right? I mean, you know, the doctors have been saying this about, you know, the kids go to the rock concerts, you know, and I can even tell that the side where the ear has been turned to the band, because that's the ear that's been, what, affected, right? So that works differently than your body, like a shock with the cold water to a hot body? Well, the thing I was pointing out there was the fact that this difference between these two kinds of reception, right? That I feel the warmth of the water in the shower, or I feel the cold of the water in the ocean more when I first go in there. And then, because my body is receiving the warmth of the water, or the cold of the water, as its own temperature, right? Because it's a material organ, then it doesn't feel so cold anymore, or feel so warm, right? And what I'm saying by that is that your sense organ receiving in this way, right, gets in the way of it receiving in this way, which shows that these are two different kinds of reception, but in a way both are going on in the sense organs because they aren't material organs, okay? And because they may see it in this way, it can also, what, be badly affected by this, or be harmed, or even, you know, like in the Spanish Civil War there, you know, they torture a guy, you know, they prop up in the eye, eyes with a toothpick, you know, and shine a light into the man's face if they went blind, right? You know, Spanish torture, so it could destroy you, right, and, you know, if you had a sound model after you, you could, you know, make a man go deaf, right? Mm-hmm. There may be some things you could maybe destroy the sense of taste act a lot, just fair enough. Mm-hmm. So you're receiving in this way here, and if it's excessive, then you can destroy the organ, right? So there's a couple points that we're making there, right? One is the fact that the excess of these objects will destroy the sense because the sense is a kind of harmony or racial proportion, but also it can get in the way, right, of your sensing. Yeah. So, my mother used to say, you know, we eat your orange first, and then eat your candy, right? Mm-hmm. And because of each candy first, then the orange should taste bitter, right? So you're kind of getting in the way of tasting the orange as an orange should taste. Mm-hmm. You see? Because of course it's too strong when there, you know, when you eat jelly beans there. You don't want to be sour. Sour, you call these things, sour this, sour that, you know? Yeah. You get a sensation when you eat these sour things, but it's destroying your sense of taste, the subtlety of it, huh? Well, I'll let there who teaches wine sometimes. Mm-hmm. But talking about it, it paid some money for some very fancy tasting, you know? Of course he's down at the hospital during the day, and of course he's drinking coffee like you do. A doctor drinks coffee, you know? And drinking too fast and got to burn his tongue, you know? Oh my gosh, I was going to spend all this money. How could he sniff the wine at least? Oh, wow. His nose is still good, but his tongue, you know, has been affected by the hot coffee, you know, too quickly, huh? Well, next time we'll start with Book Three, huh? Okay. And in Book Three our style is starting to go to what we call the inward senses, but he's primarily interested not in distinguishing all the inward senses, but in seeing the difference between reason and the inward senses, and preparing the way for reason, huh? So he's going to be talking about, you know, we'll get probably too far here, this chapter or two at the most, right? But eventually you're going to get to reason, huh? So, um, I was thinking about one of his examples there, right? Three arguments there. One of the arguments, because I have a kind of a case now where somebody from another planet I guess comes down and obliterates, let's say, the human race or some part of creation, right? Wouldn't this be bad, right? Okay. Okay. But since those people no longer exist, there's no privation or lack, right? You see? So, and he's kind of denying that the universe can be lacking in something, right? It's not really a subject, you know? Well, I think that, you know, the defect in the argument is, is that he's kind of, um, got too narrow a meaning of lack, right? Huh? He's thinking of a, of lack as being in a substance, right? Individual substance. Like a blind man, right? Or a man's, you know, lacking an arm or a leg, right? So if the human race got destroyed by this meteor or whatever it is, right? Uh, there wouldn't be any subject there to be lacking something, right? Okay? And the universe can't really be said to be lacking something because it's not a substance, you know? A conglomeration of things or something like that, right? Well, it seems to me that the defect in an argument is that he's, um, he's got, uh, too limited understanding of what, you know, lack is, huh? But it seems to me, you know, if you have, like, say a family, right? A family should have a mother and a father and then the children, right? Well, if the father dies or abandons the family or the mother dies or something like that, that's all right. Um, then this is bad, we would say, right? And we could say that, uh, um, A family that lacks a father or a mother, that's bad. And there's a lack there, right? That's it. So, you know, he's thinking, it seems to me, of lack in the sense of blindness or something of that sort, or agonements, right? Where you have an individual substance that doesn't have, right? Something he's able to have and should have, right? That's obviously bad, right? But how can you speak of someone who doesn't exist, right? To take an example here, right? As lacking something that they should have or don't have, right? And they don't exist. You can't speak of that, right? But it seems to me you can speak even in something like a family, right? That's, you know, even though it's not an individual substance, it's a certain, what, society, right? You should have a father and a mother and the children, right? And so if the father or mother, through disease or whatever, are eliminated, right? Then the family is lacking something that it, what, should have. That's bad, right? That's the way you can't speak of a lack there, you see? Just like when somebody, you know, is, you know, they're having a salad dressing, you know, and they taste it. They say, it's a homemade one. It lacks something, you know? People say that, you know? It needs something, right? You know it's just, you know, sometimes it's a mixture of things, right? You can say it's lacking, right? It doesn't have something it should have. That's the way you can't speak of a lack in that case, huh? You have some unity of substance, but... Well, you don't have an individual, the family is not an individual substance, see? You couldn't put the family into the genus of substance as a, what, species, huh? So, you can't say, it has an order, you know, unity, it has an order, you know, unity of order, but it doesn't have a, it's not one substance, right? But it seems to me you could still speak of something like that as what? Yeah, but the badness there is a lack, or it's based on lack, yeah. See? Anyway, I got, I got thinking about that now. I got thinking about this hypothetical thing, right? Okay? As you know, God created the world, right? Freely, right? Okay? And he was under no obligation, right? He was under no necessity of creating the world. In fact, he was under more obligation, right? To do so, right? Okay? Now, suppose God had not created anything. Would that have been bad? But I suspect this guy would say, It would be bad for us if we were not created, right? Or it would be bad for creatures, right? See? Now, I think that Thomas or Augustine, you know, would say that it's not bad. Because where'd that badness be? Okay? You can't have, badness is not having a lack, you can't have, what? A lack without a subject, right? Being able to have it, so it's the subject of, so not being any creatures, there couldn't be any badness, right? But I would assume that in his thinking there, see, he wants to say that there's no subject, you know, if this thing of another planet has destroyed man, or destroyed some part of the spectrum, you know, this is bad, right? But since those things have been eliminated, there's nothing there in which could be the subject of that, what? Lack, right? Okay? Now, I say, I argue against that, right? In the sense that, I think you can speak of a unity of order in the universe, right? And a unity of, you know, let me say you and I are supposed to, if we get there, to fill up the ranks of the fallen angels, right? And so on. So there's a lack there, right? Supply, right? So I'll say we can't, you know, speak of that as being a lack in some sense. And therefore, you know, definitively badness, right? Okay? But he seems to be saying that because there's no subject there left, apparently, therefore there can't be any lack, right? And yet it's still bad. And therefore he's saying that for them not to be is bad, right? Well, then it seems to me he'd probably say the same thing if he put it out of creation, right? For no creatures to be would be bad. And of course, no creatures were, there wouldn't be any privation or lack. So Aristotle and Thomas would have to reply, well, then it's not bad. And he'd probably be saying, well, yeah, obviously, you think you're denying the truth, right? It wouldn't be bad for us not to be. Right? See? And, uh, I see a person might think that, right? Um, but I wonder if that isn't, you know, false to imagine, right? And, you know, sometimes Thomas says that the, um, you know, creation's not really a change, right? But sometimes you imagine, you know, the creature is not having existence and having existence as if the creature is somehow the subject of this change from non-being to being, right? But it's not really that, because there's been no creature there to underlie this so-called change from non-being to being, right? You kind of, you kind of imagine creation to be a change. Yeah. And, uh, you know, and, uh, that's a false imagination, really. And so when you think of the creatures not being at all, you see them as being deprived of something they could have and should have. That isn't true. They're not there to be deprived of anything. And, uh, and, uh, and that existence is not owed to them in any way, right? So there's nothing bad about that. See? But it seems to me that that's, in a way, what he'd have to say, though, you know, you'd have to, you know, be consistent with his thinking, right? It's a non-existence of part of the material world, right? Whether it be man or whatever it might be is bad, even though there's no privation or lack there according to this thing, right? The non-existence of the whole of creation would be bad, right? But wouldn't it be? Say something is destroyed that's not immortal like a tree or blown up. We might say that that's, you know, something bad happened to the tree. They're looking back to the tree, you know, it's already existing, you know. All these forest fires they have down in Colorado now and so on and in the summer they have a burning forest and so on, you know, all these trees things. Yeah. Kampanibaba, Hiroshima, you know, the Australian people, right? And so, what is the... But I think you can, you can, you can stay something nevertheless about that, right? That, that, you are being corrupted, right? In some sense there's a privation there. Of course, let's say it's a good thing. Yeah, yeah. But it's not evil of matter but of the ones we had before, right? That's a little problem there, you know. But you still have a subject of privation, right? right? But it's evil not of the matter, but of the one that had the form, right? Yeah. Maybe there's still a subject for the privation there, the matter. You have to see that as the end of the corruption, right? And not simply by itself. For matter not to have this form is not bad. But the lack of this form as the end of the corruption of this other thing can be said in some way to be the privation of the other thing, even though it's not the subject of it. But it's a hard thing to understand, too. I mean, I should speak of that. But it seems to me that it does not as much as his argument there, right? As the fact that the non-existence of these things was bad, right? Period. Yeah. And if that's so, it seems to me that you would probably think that the non-existence of creatures would be something bad. But if God had not created, it would be nothing bad, really. That kind of states to think of that, right? You know. That's a reason not to create. A more reason not to create than to create, right? Because creation is going to involve something bad. So what does he say is bad? Well, I mean, he gets the proposition, you know, that the root of things is lack, right? I mean, I haven't read this article seriously, but the whole thing, but it's kind of again, a little bit, you know, in the channel. I feel occasionally thinking more deeply about this, you know. I mean, there's a text of Thomas, you know, where distinguishes, you know, three meanings of it were bad. That'd be part of the case of the problem. Because the first meaning is lack. The second is what has the lack. The third is what causes the lack, right? So what has the lack is not just a lack. And it's said to be bad in some way, right? But in reference to the lack, right? And what causes the lack is not simply a lack, right? So Thomas is not saying everything that is bad is a lack. He's not saying that. So he may not understand that, you know. But, see, one of his other arguments is from pain, right? And he says, even at a sentence, that pain is not just a lack, right? Well, maybe there's another way of dividing the bad, just like you divide the good into the, you know, the honest and the pleasant and the useful and so on, right? But I think pain is something, pain is such a something bad, but, and pain is not, I don't think, just a lack, right? See? But the cause of pain is something that is lacking in something. So if the cause of pain is something that is lacking, we expect pain itself to be lacking in something, right? Okay? And likewise, if pleasure and pain are contraries, and like we learned in the first book of Natural Hearing, one contrary is always privy to respect to the other, right? Pain is lacking in something, in comparison to pleasure, huh? And of course you see that pleasure is a perfection of the work or operation itself, right? Pain is not the perfection of the work, is it? It's whole. So it's lacking the health of the body? So it's lacking something, yeah. But its cause also is, you know, something is a lack, right? I don't think pain is to be understood as just a lack. I don't think, you know, Thomas Aristotle would understand it as just a lack either, you know? Therefore it's not just bad? Well, I think pain as such is bad, right? You know, pratcheting as it can be good, right? But pain as such is bad, right? Could you say if it's not just a lack, then the part of it that's not a lack would be... Well, it's a little bit like when you talk about vice, you know? Is vice, part of vice good? Well, maybe so, but still vice as such is bad, right? Now, pain as such is bad, maybe not just in a moral sense necessarily, right? But pain is such as something bad, huh? The difficulty to get into when you deny that there's a lack at the basis of everything bad, right? Then you're saying that there's a being which is lacking in nothing but is bad. But every being as such is like God, who is I am who I am, right? So then you have what? The bad is, some bad is what? God-like. Right? That position, huh? At TAC, I think. I think he has some student, some girl student who went on to study in Europe and wrote some doctoral thesis on the subject too, you know? So I think he picked up the idea, it's that stupid though, right? You know? I mean, it's easier to wear it too, the fact that this is contrary to, you know, what Augustine seems to be saying and Thomas is saying, you know, but. I'm scotis. I don't know. I don't know. Did they say something like that? I don't know. I was wondering. Yeah. Because the background had it. I mean, I've been kind of thinking about pain, you know, but since he involves a lack or, you know, to have a lack, you know, because, you know, it's so easy. It's interesting metaphorically, you know, we speak of sadness, it's dark, you know? You know, darkness is a very common example of a lack, right? I've been having pain, I've been having a lot of suffering, he says, I've been in a cave for so long. Sure, sure. So that's kind of a common thing here, Aristotle, until I was beginning to book ten, the two contraries, one is always lacking something, right, from a person to the other. We saw them in the first book, do you remember? Mm-hmm. Ah, that's really cool. Ahem.