De Anima (On the Soul)
Lecture 34: The Common Sense and the Reception of Contraries

Transcript
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The conclusion that there is a, what, central sense, right? That's knowing these different sensibles together at the same time and saying that they're different, right? Then he's going to give a solution to that objection, right? And then he's going to, what, counter-object to the solution, saying it's insufficient. And he's going to propose a certain likeness there to give us the, what, true solution, huh? Okay. So in 289, he gives the objection, right? And in 290, he gives a solution to the objection. But in 291, he objects to the solution, to the objection, right? The original objection. And then in 292, he gives the true solution, huh? Okay. And then in 292, he gives the truth to the solution. And then in 292, he gives the truth to the solution, right? And then in 292, he gives the truth to the solution, right? And then in 292, he gives the truth to the solution. Now, you've got to look at this objection, I think, in the context of the way you approach the senses, and in the context, too, of the way our mind actually comes to these things. We've learned before how sensing is a kind of undergoing, right? A kind of being acted upon. A kind of receiving, right? Now, it's more known to us how matter receives things than how the senses receive something. And so we have to, in a way, distinguish between the way that the senses receive and the way matter receives, the way matter is acted upon and the way the senses act upon. Nevertheless, there's a likeness between the two, right? And this objection, in a sense, seems to be based upon something that we see, first of all, in matter. Because matter doesn't seem to be able to be acted upon by contraries at the same time. So that if the... piece of wood, or whatever it is, is becoming hot, it can't be becoming cold at the same, what, time, right, huh? Okay. So how can there be one thing being moved by contraries and different types of things, huh? So he says in the objection here, but indeed it is impossible that the same as undivided is moved according to contrary motions and in an undivided time. For sweet in this way, it moves the sense of the understanding, but the bitter in a, what, contrary way, right? And again, the white even in another different way, huh? So how can one and the same thing be moved in all these different ways? Okay. Maybe the objection, though, partly is confusing the way matter is moved with the way the senses are moved, right? But he's starting from what is more known to us, and the objection comes to mind. Then he kind of solves it with the way we might possibly solve some problems about the way matter we see. Is it, therefore, that the discerning is together and undivided in number and unseparated, while in being it is separated, huh? Now, I think that's always confusing the way Aristotle speaks there. How can I be so presumptuous as to criticize? When Aristotle talks about the definition of a thing, and the definition speaks about what was to be, right? He sometimes just takes to be there. There's a kind of contraction of that, right? So he's saying that it's one in number, right? But many in definition, huh? Now, let me try to explain that with a simple example of putting back to what we saw before. Remember this contrast we're making when talking about motion. We said you have an ability for some kind of activity or any kind of ability, for that matter. You distinguish one ability from another by what it's an ability for, right? So, let's say the ability to talk and the ability to walk, are they the same ability? No. And why not? Talking is not the same as walking. Yeah. If talking were a form of walking, then it would come under the ability to walk, right? Or if walking was a kind of talking, right? Okay. So, we need two different abilities, and you can, what? Talk and walk at the same time. We're very intelligent, right? Okay. You know, I'll joke about it, you know. Can't walk and should go at the same time. Phrase L.B. James to use about his opponents. Can't walk and should go at the same time. I know you said two things, okay? But you do those two things together, because it leads to your friend, what? Abilities, right? Now, let's take a little different example here. I have the ability to be, let's say, healthy, right? I'm also able to be, what? Sick, right? So, sometimes in my life, you can say, I have been sick, and sometimes I am healthy, right? Okay? I'm more healthy than sick, though. Because sometimes you're one, sometimes you're the other, right? Okay? Now, is it the same thing to be healthy and to be sick? No. Okay? But now, is the ability to be healthy and the ability to be sick? I need two different abilities, like the ability to talk and the ability to walk. If they were really distinct abilities, I could be healthy and sick at the same time. But my being healthy excludes really my being sick at the same time, right? And my being sick excludes my being healthy at the same time, right? So, it seems to be the same thing, my body in some way, that is able to be healthy or to be, what? Sick, right? It can't be both at the same time, right? Okay? Nevertheless, you could say that the ability to be healthy and the ability to be sick are two in definition. that that that you could say you could say Here you're defining ability by healthy, here you're defining ability by what? Sickness, right? So in a way it's two in definition, or in being, as you would say, right? But one in number, right? Okay? I'll take another example of that, right? Suppose you have a nice piece of clay here in the room, right? We say that clay has an ability to be, let's say, cute, right? It also has an ability to be a sphere. Can it be a cube and a sphere though at the same time? Now, there's really two different abilities of the clay. There's an ability to be a cube and there's an ability to be a sphere. You might say, it's really one ability, let's call it the moldability. It's moldable, the clay, right? But this moldability of the clay is what enables it to become a sphere or a cube or a cylinder or any other things, right? Okay? So it seems to be really the same ability, the moldability. But we define it, what? Differently, right? Now, I think my ability to stand and my ability to what? Sit, right? Are they like my ability to stand and my ability to talk? I can talk and stand at the same time. I can sit and talk at the same time. That's the curse, right? But I can't sit and what? Stand at the same time, right? Right. Okay? So, what is this ability that we call the common sense or the central sense, right? Is it like the ability to talk and to walk? Or is it like the ability to be healthy and the ability to be safe? Which is what? What? It is the ability called the common sense there, right? I'm able to, what, know by the common sense, both color, let's say, and sweetness, right? Okay. Or black and the taste of licorice, right? And I can compare these two and say that they are different now, right? Okay? So is the common sense in that respect, right, more like the ability to be healthy, the ability to be sick, or like the ability to talk, the ability to walk? Well, I think it's more like talking or walking, because you can talk at the same time as all these other things. Yeah. But notice, the ability to talk and the ability to walk, you have one more ability. Right. See? And so a man could, you know, be paralyzed and still have the ability to talk, or vice versa. He could be impeded in his speech, but still have the ability to walk, right? They're really two different abilities. And what we've been arguing before is that it must be one and the same, right? That knows both, right? Okay? Okay? And so therefore, someone might try to say, well, it's like this second one, right? We really have one ability, but it's an ability for, what, opposites, right? Okay? But it's not really exactly what the common sense is, because you don't at the same time receive, what, both, right? Okay? You don't at the same time, you're not at the same time healthy and sick, right? Okay? But at the same time, you're discerning the difference between white and sweet, right? Maybe between white and black, right? We're back to the other senses, right? White and black, right? So the exception there in knowing is not exactly like this, is it, huh? Because here, one contrary excludes the other, right? You see, as you go up from the senses and towards reason, this becomes even more true. That reason is even more capable than senses of receiving contraries at the same time. And so there's a famous proposition there in Aristotle, and it goes back to Plato, right? It comes up, I don't know if you've ever read the dialogue called the Symposium, right? Okay? A good example there at the Yim. And everybody's had quite a bit to drink, and so on. And they all kind of slid under the table. And at the end, the young people conversing are Socrates and the tragic poet Agatha, who is the man in his honor, this host of Poesies being held, because he's won the, what, first prize for writing tragedies that year, right? And then there's a comic poet, what, Aristophanes, right? Who's won the prize, I guess, for his comedies, right? And the last bit of conversation of the guy who's never reading this says that Socrates was saying to Agathon and to Aristophanes that if you knew what you were doing, you could write both tragedy and, what, comedy, right? Well, I don't know that much about these men, but as far as I know, Aristophanes could only really succeed at comedy when we write tragedy. And maybe Agathon was reversed, he could write tragedy but not comedy, right? Moliere seems to be, you know, a comic dramatist, but he doesn't seem to be able to write, what, tragic, right? But you take the two supreme poets, Homer and Aristophanes, and they can write both, what, tragedy and comedy, huh? Now, in the case of Homer, we've lost Homer's comic work, which is called the Margites. He has certain quotes on that in Plato and so on. But in the book on the Poetic Art, Aristophanes says that the Margites is to comedy, but the Iliad is to what? Tragedy, right? So, if that is true, then Homer excelled in both. In the same way as Shakespeare, you know, a lot of times people, you know, they hear Roman Juliet or King Lear, and they introduce the tragedies, or Macbeth, right? And so on. But I remember my brother, you know, seeing one of the Shakespeare's comics, he didn't realize how funny Shakespeare was. So, Shakespeare can do both, right? In the same way that a great actor like Ellington Guinness, you know, he can do these comic roles very well, but then he can do the tragic roles. By the lesser artists, the only one or the other, right? They're kind of limited, huh? But going back to Socrates, you marked, right? He said if you knew what you were doing, right, you could do both, right? But that's based upon, you know, a thought that comes out in different places in the time of dialogue, it's even more fully Aristotle, that there's the same knowledge of what? Opposites. Opposites, yeah. See? So, the medical art, for example, is a knowledge of what? Health and sickness, right? And if the doctor says that your blood pressure is abnormal, your blood pressure is unhealthy, it's high, right? He couldn't possibly know that your blood pressure is high if he didn't know what normal blood pressure should be, right, you know? Or now they're always checking your cholesterol, you know, and they want to help me out in 200, whatever that means, right? Okay? And so, in the very knowledge of what abnormal blood pressure is, or high blood pressure is, is an understanding of what normal or healthy blood pressure is, huh? So, one opposite, in a way, doesn't exclude the other opposite in our knowledge, but it's a, what? Help to knowing the other. In the same way, in ethics, huh? You can't really know what virtue is, moral virtue, for example, that's a habit, right, in the middle, right, towards us, is a deterministic reason, without at the same time knowing that devices are excess or, what, defect, right? So, courage is between cowardice or cowardliness and foolhardiness, huh? And generosity, or liberality, is between stinginess and extravagance. So I told you that a student I had when I was first teaching at St. Murray's College in California there, my brother Mark and Ron MacArthur, he said, you know, you guys shouldn't be teaching ethics, right, because they're the same knowledge of opposites, right? So if you teach them ethics, they learn about the bad as well as about the good. And since most people are inclined to be bad, he says, you're making them worse. You know, it's kind of a clever objection to teaching ethics, which is probably, if you remember rightly, a required course, right? It wasn't a lot of colleges, huh? So it's kind of a bright student, you know, if they've got this objection, huh? The same way, as a logician, you know about correct and, what, incorrect reasoning, huh? And so in general, there's the same knowledge of opposites. But that's contrary to the way opposites are in matter, right? So although in my knowledge of high blood pressure, in my knowledge of abnormal blood pressure, right, is my knowledge of normal blood pressure, right? In my body, I can't have both at the same time, right? So that's one of the striking ways that we show that reason is something, what, immaterial, that doesn't receive opposites in the way that the, what, that matter does, right? In matter, one opposite excludes the other, but in reason, one opposite helps you to know the other, you know, saying there that opposites alongside each other are more clear, right? And so knowing what tragedy is doesn't prevent you from knowing what comedy is, you can see in a sense better what comedy is because you know what tragedy is, and vice versa, right? And knowing what joy is doesn't prevent you from knowing what sadness is, or vice versa. But in a sense, knowing what joy is, it helps to know what sadness is, and vice versa. But in my body, I can't be at the same time joyful and sad, right? Okay. So, now, matter in some way has an ability for opposites, not at the same time. That is kind of interesting if you study Hegel and Marx, you see. What Hegel does in his system is to take the way opposites are in our mind, and then he flip-flops that into matter. So, because in our mind, opposites are together, then he puts opposites together in matter. Now, it's kind of amusing because Marx, coming after Hegel, he says, we're going to set Hegel on his feet again, you see. That what's fundamental, Marx thinks, is matter. He's a materialist, right? And what goes on in thought is just a reflection of the way matter is. So, Marx is going to reverse the order and start with matter. But he's already borrowed from Hegel the idea that there are opposites together in matter. And that goes all the way down, you know, you find Lenin defining dialectics in the Marxist sense, you know. It's a study of the contradiction, he says, of the very essence of things. So, Marx has not really set Hegel on his feet again. He's transposed, right, the way things are in the mind into matter, right? Okay. And rather than starting out with matter, then rising up. But when you start with matter, then you see this difference, you know, later on, when you study the knowing power. So, perhaps in that first solution, one is assimilating the union of opposites there, even in the sense powers, too much to the, what, way in which opposites can be found in, what, matter, right? Or is this not possible, he says, right? For what is the same and undivided is the contraries in potency, right? While not in being. But it is divided by being worked on. And it's not possible, white and black, to be together, at least in matter, you might say, right? Whence neither is it possible to suffer the species of these, if sense and understanding are such, right? You can't suffer them, what, or undergo them, or be acted upon, right? At the same time, right? He says, if sense and understanding are such, right? If they are like, you might say, matter, right? Okay? Now, in the last paragraph, in 292, he gives another way of speaking about this, another likeness, huh? Okay? And he's comparing now the central sense to a point, right? Which should be considered the beginning of many lines, right? Until again, you might have the eye, let's say, and the ear, and the tongue, and so on, right? And this central or common sense, he says, is like a point here, right? Which can be considered as the beginning of all these, right? And the root of all them, or as the end, right? Of them, huh? Okay? So in the eye, or the ear, and so on, the tongue acting upon, that acting upon, in some way goes back, right? To the, what, central or common sense, huh? Now, is that one point, or many points, then? Yeah, it's one point, huh? Okay? But it can be considered as the beginning or end of this line, right? And as the beginning or end of this line, or the beginning or end of that line, right? And actually at the same time, right? So the central sense is like that, rather than like this example we had here, going back to the way opposites are in matter, right? Okay? Okay. Okay. Okay. Now, you might define, as we would define this somewhat broad sense, you might define this point as the beginning of that line going to the eye. You might also define it as the beginning of what? The line going to the ear, right? You might also define it as the beginning of the line going to the tongue, and so on. Okay? But that's different than defining this ability, right, of the body to be healthy or sick. By either health or by sick, right? Okay? Or defining, let's say, take my example there of the clay. You might say the moldability of the clay is an ability to be a seer. That's what it is. Right? It doesn't exhaust what it is, but it says in some way what it is, right? The moldability of the clay is an ability to be a seer. It's also an ability to be a cube, right? It's also an ability to be a cylinder and so on, right? It's also an ability to be a pyramid, right? Okay? But it can't be all those at the same time, right? Okay? So, but this point here is what? Again, one in number, but it's actually the same time, right? Beginning or the end of this line going to the eye, and the beginning or end of this line going to the ear, right? And the beginning or end of this line going to the, what? Tongue, right? That's an interesting comparison that he makes there, right? So in one way it's one, right? There's one point. In another way it's many insofar as it can be considered as the beginning or end of any different, what? Lines, right? And actually at the same time. Okay? I think I mentioned here and make a little side here, but I think it's kind of interesting. How I use this analogy to the point when I'm explaining the Incarnation, right? In the Incarnation you have, what? Two natures, right? But one person, right? Mm-hmm. And of course, the heresies people got into sometimes was, or one group of heresies, was that because there are two natures, there must be what? Two persons. Two persons, right? Okay. So that's kind of a whole lot of examples, right? Yeah. Because the person is something indivisible, right? So it's like a point, huh? And you say, well, if you've got two natures, terms of the nature by these lines, you're going to have two, what, points to determine it in. If you have two natures, two lines, you have two endpoints, right? Yeah. Because human nature, right? It's got to be heaven and, right? And so the divine. So if you have two persons, you have two natures, right? But, actually, that's not the way it took place. You see? You have the divine nature, right? Mm-hmm. The divine person. And the human nature was, what? Taken to the divine person. So, notice, huh? If you didn't draw the second line to the end point of the original line, then the second line would have its own end point in it. But when you draw the second line to the point that's the end of the first line, it doesn't have its own end point, distinct from the end point of the original line, but it's the same end point. So, two natures in one, what, person, right? Right, yeah. Okay. That's only, you know, like incarnation in a very distant way, right? You know, it's a little crutch there and so on. But you kind of see, you know, why is it that my human nature, my individual human nature has its own, what, person, right? Distinct from your person, right? Why the individual human nature, Christ, right, doesn't have its own person, but it's separate from the second person of the blessed trinity. See? Why is that, right? See? Well, just a kind of a distant lightness here, see? If I say, here you've got a line with its own end point, and now you're going to draw a second line. Is that second line going to have its own end point? Well, we just consider it by itself, you've got to draw a line, it's got to have its own end point, different from the end point of the original first line, right? But if you draw that second line to the end point of the first one, you see, this is the way, you know, in theology, they use it in the Latin, they'll say, he assumes, right? Okay? You know? Some, I guess, I just take to oneself, right? He takes the human nature to himself, right? The same way that I draw this line to, that end point. And therefore, there's only one person subsisting into what nature is, the human and the divine. That's a quite different, useful point, but point is very useful, right? There's another comparison I think for me to make, I think it's kind of interesting, too. You know, the first meaning of the word beginning is that of what? Point. The point is the beginning of a line, or a line is the beginning of a surface, right? Or a surface is the beginning of a body, right? That's the first meaning of beginning, because it's the one that's most known to us, right? Most sensible. But, when you take up the word beginning and the word cause, you find out that every cause is a beginning in some way, but not every beginning is a, what? A cause, right? Okay? Now, the question is, can a beginning have a beginning? Which is like the question, then, can a cause have a cause? Yeah, yeah. But notice now, right? The surface is the beginning of a body, but the surface is the beginning that has a beginning. So the six, say, squares that are the surfaces of a cube, right? The square is a what? Beginning of the cube, right? But the square has a beginning itself, which is what? The four lines, yeah. So the line is a beginning of the what? Square, which is a beginning of the cube. So it's a beginning that has a beginning, right? Okay, now, the line is at a beginning, but has a beginning? Sure. Yeah. And the beginning of a line is a point. Right. Okay. What about the point? It's the beginning of the point? Yeah. It doesn't have a beginning, does it? No. No. It's indivisible, right? So it's kind of interesting, huh? This kind of, in a more general aspect, right, reflects the fact of what you learned about causes. That a cause can have a cause, right? But eventually you come to a cause that has no cause. Right. And that's the first cause, right? Right. But it's very concrete to see that with the example of the point, huh? Absolutely. So it's a beautiful thing there. The other place, I think I mentioned, we studied the Trinity there, not Trinity, eternity. Thomas' comparison of eternity to the point of the center of a circle. And he compares it like this, huh? He'll say, the now of eternity is like the center of a circle, which is in the same relation to all the points on the circumference, right? It's directly opposite, you might say, to them, right? But, if you look at the points on the circumference, one is before or after another, right? Right. So the nows of time are before and after each other, but the now of eternity is present to the nows of the past, the present, and the future. Everything is present to God in his knowledge, huh? So he compares that to the center, to the point of the center of a circle, which is not a part of that circumference at all, is it, huh? So the now of eternity is outside the entirely of time. Why the nows of time are arranged, you might say in time, before and after each other. It makes another comparison, you know, which is the man who's on top of a mountain, and he can see, you know, down in a road like that, this curve, you know, he can see at once, people who are there, who are there, who are there, who are there, but to those who are down the road, right? So we are hills, I think, you know, and there's so many trying to catch up with us, you know. But, they're all, what, spread out together, right? The man and the mountain, huh? This is the one he makes with the point, huh? So, if you excuse the pun, you can make a lot of points. What's the point, huh? You said on that one, the nows of time, or on the circumference, points on the circumference? Yeah, one is before or after another, right? Yeah. But the point in the center there is directly across, you might say, from each of them, huh? And therefore, it's like the now of eternity, huh? See how important it's to know a little bit of geometry so we can, these points, you know, the actual philosophy, and all the way up to the eternity, and the incarnation, and all those wonderful things. So just as the point there is the, come back to the example now, just as the point is one in number there, but it's the beginning and the end of all these lines, right? And can be considered in that way as many, right? So this is the way the central sense is. They could also take it, you know, in the sense of the point there in a line, right? That point there is one, right? And if you're speaking of the lines continuous, huh? Continuous, if you may recall from the second book of Natural Hearing of the Physics, the continuous is that whose parts have a common, what? Limit, huh? Common boundary, right? So in the case of a circle, I'd say the diameter is the common boundary of the two sides, right? Okay? In the line, this point here, right, is the common limit of these two parts of the line, huh? So you can speak of one, what, point there, right? But you'd also speak of it as being the end of this line and the, what, beginning of that line, right? The same way you might speak of the diameter of the circle as being the end of the left side and the beginning of the, what, right side. So you can use it as one line, right? Or in some way as two, right? It's the beginning of one and the end of the other. Therefore, as undivided, what discerns is one and at one time. While as being divided, it uses twice the same point at the same time. Therefore, it discerns two insofar as it uses the limit twice. And it discerns the separate things as a separate day. As one, it discerns something one and at one time. Now, in the last sentence here, what's what Aristotle's been doing here? He's not yet saying that we've come to something that really transcends altogether the sense order, right? And what's what he's saying here in the last sentence? This is the epilogue here. Concerning then the principle of the source, the soul, by which we say an animal is sensitive, that it be determined in this way, up to this point, right? In other words, he's not considering this common sense as something entirely outside the genus of sense, like reason will be seen later on to me, but he's seeing it as what? Something still in the order of the senses. And so we call it an inward sense, huh? Now, maybe sometime when we look at some of the articles in the Summa Theologiae on the soul, right? Thomas, in the article there on the inward senses, he goes more into the inward senses than Aristotle does here, right? And following some thinking that Avicenna in particular did, right? Aristotle talks about some of these in the later books there. But it's kind of amusing in Shakespeare's time, you know, they got into the habit of talking about five inward senses. They got the number corresponding to the outward senses. But Thomas doesn't speak of five inward senses, maybe just a four. But we'll look at that more in detail. Anyway, Aristotle here has come to something inward, but not yet to what? The mind or reason or the understanding, huh? You want to take a break over there or something? Okay. It's a good place to do it before we go out to the fourth meeting here. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a good place to do it before we go out to the fourth meeting here.