De Anima (On the Soul)
Lecture 37: Imagination, Sense, and Opinion: Distinction and Definition

Transcript
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things to the Father, right? There's a connection there, right? Kind of strange. It doesn't unfold it there, you know. So I was thinking about it. I was thinking about it in terms of the Fifth Book of Wisdom, right? Aristotle takes up the word one, obviously, right? And he says it's the property of the one to be a beginning. I wonder if that isn't a connection, right? Because the Father is the beginning of the whole Trinity. And therefore, you might appropriate the beginning, especially to the Father, right? Because he's the beginning of all, right? So you have to see the connection between the Father and the beginning, right? And beginning and one, and therefore between the Father and one. I remember when we were doing the Gospel of St. John, remember, and Thomas explains this in more than one way, the words of St. John in the beginning was the word. But among the many explanations he gives of that, he could be taking the sense that in the beginning, in the Father, was the Son, remember that? And that's kind of striking, right? Because there, a beginning is taken for the, what? Kind of appropriated to the Father, right? But then he goes in the Fifth Book of Wisdom, Aristotle's very clear about that, that the one and the beginning, right? It's going to go together. That the one, it's probably the one to be a beginning. It's kind of interesting. You see it in ancient Greeks, right? They look for the beginning of all things. You know, they naturally at first look for something one, right? Until they had some reason made to think they couldn't be just one beginning, right? They naturally look for one beginning, right? In the same way, you know, when the modern physicists always look for unity, like Einstein says, or like Max Planck says, this is the goal, always the goal of the scientist's unity, right? So they're looking at something for a beginning, and they think of it as being something, what? One, right, huh? So that to me, that seemed to make some sense, you know? And then I got thinking about another thing that I'd worked on a little bit when I was explaining Shakespeare's definition of reason, you know, as, you know, the ability to look before and after, right? Before and after, in the Fifth Book of Wisdom, pertain to the particular names of the One, okay? And because before and after type of the beginning, and the beginning type of the One, right? And, but, I was trying to manifest that this is the way to go by the fact that when you take up the transcendentals, and most of the fundamental one is being itself, right? But after being and thing comes One, right? But One comes before understandable, and therefore before truth and definition. And Thomas would quote Aristotle, you know, he who doesn't understand one thing understands nothing, right? Something has to be One in some way to be what? Understandable. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like Heisenberg says there in the Gifford Lectures, right, you know? He says, you know, at first the world seems like a, you know, a kaleidoscope of, you know, all the two of the things, but in order to understand we have to find some kind of order, and that means unity, he says, right? And he says, that's the way it goes, right? Before and after is order that gives you some unity, some kind of the beginning of some sort, huh? So, it's interesting, right? And as you need to manifest, you know, how Shakespeare hit the nail on the head, right? But you have to see that something must be One in some way to be understandable, and therefore to be true, huh? Well, now, if the Father is the beginning of the Son, per modum intellectus, right? And One is the, what? What's right to be supposed? Then there'd be two reasons, right, huh? Why the unity of the substance would be a footprint of the Father, right? The Father is the principium, most of all, right? He's the principium that has the principium, right? Yeah. And why the Son has the principium, beginning of the Father, right? And the Holy Spirit has the beginning of the Father and the Son as the One, yeah? So, that's the first reason why One would be the footprint of the Father, but also in so far as the Father is the beginning of the Son, by way of intellect. It's appropriate that the One be, He be One, right? Because only the One is understandable. Well, when God's understood, then He has a thought of Himself, and that's the Word. The Deuteronomy is made flesh, but the Word, huh? See, Hegel, as far as I know, he probably takes, you know, the Word is made flesh, you know, literally, right? You go from the first part, Hegel's system, to the second part, right? You know, thoughts all of a sudden becomes matter, right? How does that happen? Nobody can explain how Hegel himself can go from one to the other, right? But in His influence, you know, you always find this crazy, perverse imitation of theology in modern philosophy, especially Hegel. So, the Word was made flesh, thought was made matter, right? It's crazy. That's how you know about getting the opposites into matter, right? You know, and the first time I met Charles Dicktonic, he's going to give a lecture on Marxism, that's the time when the Marxist comes from power and Russia, you know, and that was a thing, and he came down and gave a talk there in St. Paul, and I met Mark Gasseryk's house there, and he's kind of talking, with Gasseryk, we were going to talk about that night, you know, and he was explaining, you know, Phoenix, 19, Hegel, and Marx, and it would be kind of beautiful to see that, when I was telling the Word was made flesh. And thought became matter, right? Grants, he rises up into spirit, right? It's crazy stuff. Is he been involved in the universities, Hegel? We dominated the German universities there around 1830, right? We died in 1770 to 1831, yes. But I mean, when, you know, Marx, you know, I always had a respect for Hegel, but they all fell on the influence of Hegel there, you know. Is Hegel there a story? They say philosophy since there's been kind of a dismembering of the corpse of Hegel. Everybody grabbed so far here. Running off into helping in some crazy way. A lot of parts. They used to say that the fight between the Nazis and the communists, you know, the Russian and Germany at one time, was left and the right wing of the, right and left wing of the Hegelians. He was a priest and he did his dissertation on something in St. Thomas in Rome. Yeah. Might have been the name of Hegel coming. He said that when he proposed to do his dissertation on this thing in St. Thomas, the teacher of the seminary said, he said, I don't understand. You're a German. Why aren't you doing your study of Hegel? You can be German. You just used to do Hegel. So still, it's a thing even in Rome. I guess because they got some other Hegel where he admits that he's purposely really obscure because if he writes it in an understandable way, people won't think he's so great. Probably like I'll say earlier there, he's better to talk about what the guy means, you know, can't sit around and judge. You said that Heidegger was obscure too with this. Oh, yeah. He's even worse, yeah. He's worse? Oh, yeah. Yeah. He's worse. Hegel than Heidegger. There's some good things in Hegel, you know, from time to time, you know. I think Hegel has some very nice things about the... One time I taught the senior seminar, you know, philosophy and tragedy and we read the Poetics and we read his volume and get Hegel on tragedy, you know, brings together his pregnancy and tragedy. He says some good things, you know. Like when he describes, when he talks about the superiority of Homer's characters over the characters in the French tragedy, you know. The French tragedy characters, like the one-dimensional people, you know, the kind of persification of some passion or something, you know, by the characters of Homer like a dying, you know, mini facets, you know, and you know, you can see how full the characters of Homer, you know, compared to... of Homer's characters of Homer's characters of Homer's characters of Homer's characters of Homer's characters of Homer's characters of Homer's characters characters of these French tragedies, and then he has some interesting things on Homer's language, right, you know, Homer's use of the simile, right, and some interesting things to say there. In the same way, you know, when Hegel talks about all the so-called imitative arts or fine arts, right, and I think his order is correct, right, in other words, that, you know, tragedy is higher than music, right? It's an art, but music is higher than, what, painting, sculpture, you know? I have a couple of colleagues there, you know, who still maintain, you know, that painting was higher than music, you know? I mean, part of the reasons why music is superior, you ought to know it, you know, without having to get caught these things, you know? And same colleague there who ended up, you know, maintaining that Virgil's need is greater than Homer's epics, I mean, it's ridiculous, I mean, it's so clear, you know, when Kierkegaard is talking about these, you know, the excellence of the Don Giovanni, right, you know, Don Giovanni is the opera of operas, right, and there'll never be a better opera than Don Giovanni, right? You know, someone wanted to, you know, try to equal Mozart, you know, he was writing Don Giovanni for Giovanni over, but it's proportionally that Don Giovanni is the opera, but the Iliad is the epic, right? There's never going to be a better epic than the Iliad, that's it. There's a perfect correspondence, you know, he says, of content and form, you know? You know, it's something you recognize, you know, as being, you know, it's never going to be. It's just like, you know, Roman and Juliet, you know, young lovers, that kind of thing. Nothing better than Roman and Juliet, that's it. It's just so perfect, right? And I remember Demolion, the guy I mentioned earlier, you know, he's good in these things too. Demolion talking about how, you know, how art in a way is determined, as opposed to prudence, right, as determination, and how, you know, when the artist is looking for the right word even, you know, he gets the right word, you know, he has kind of a judgment that this is the right word, the only one to say it. And it's kind of interesting, you know, if you read, even at Dickens, you know, he's not the greatest master in words, but when he was thinking about what title he gives some of his books, right? He just seemed to get the right title, you know? Great Expectations, you know, it's just the right thing. Do you like Dickens a lot? What's your, like, great expectations? Yeah, I think, yeah, Seven Ways and Dickens is probably the greatest novelist we have, but... Oh, okay. But... I don't know if I can read that. I'd like to read it. He's Washington Irving, you know, he's really, he's the master of English style. He replaced Addison, right? Did you ever see C.S. Lewis's paper on Addison, you know? Because Addison was taken as a master of English style, right? But then I guess Irving replaced him, you know? So in Japan, they were learning English through Washington Irving. I don't know what the English is supposed to be like. But... And it's absolutely marvelous the way he writes. I mean, it's... I've got to read some examples. It's just incredible. Incredible. It's just... It's just perfect. He's the best writer there is in America, America ever had. Washington Irving. Yeah, yeah. Too much neglected now by the writer's genre. The way I got into him, you know, one Christmas there, my brother Mark always thought he'd be a great style, you know? So one Christmas he sent me, uh... And Richard, you know, and I saw these gift editions, you know, of the sketchbook, right? So it's occasionally... And I was buying and getting to me about this. I said, we read this sketchbook, right? I really had to take care of it before. I really got amazed, you know? How great it was. How well it was written. So I started, you know, looking and using bookshops, you know, for volumes, you know? And he gave me quite a bit of it, you know? It's really kind of marvelous what he writes. And there's something, you know, very healthy about his imagination, too, huh? I don't know. Sick stuff, you know? Once you get in contemporary authors, huh? He said he's a great American writer. Yeah, oh yeah. No question about that. I really, I can read you something, just how well he freezes things, you know? Something kind of inborn, too, you know? In front of the man. Irving himself like Goldsmith, you know? And he wrote a barbecue with Goldsmith. And in the beginning, you know, in honor to Goldsmith, you know, he quotes the words of Dante there. It's kind of his paviosis, not paviosis, but his kind of his hymn of praise there that he learned how to write from Virgil, right? And so, you know, he endured from Goldsmith, how to write, right? It's kind of, you know, kind of a praise like that. So I guess, you know, at the end of the year, as you know, somebody started attacking Irving. You know, he just borrowed Goldsmith's style, right? And, yeah, Irving was the nephew of Irving, who collaborated with him at the end there. You know, he mentioned this to him. And Irving was just a very mild man. He kind of smiled, you know, that it's kind of a stylistic thing he'd done there, you know? You can't really learn the style from another man, right? He has to come natural to you, right? And he didn't know where his style came from, but just flew from his pen, you know? And he reminds me, you know, of Mozart, you know, lived in a kind of vulgar age, you know? But he says, if writing music doesn't come to you like piddling comes to a cow, he says, you better not write at all. It's just a natural thing, the way it's kind of, you know? The style is just... See why he plays Addison is much better than Addison, I think. But, you know, if you look at the praise, you know, to Irving, that C.S. Lewis has in Addison's, you know, style, you know? But for me, to see to that, you realize he's the master. But, yeah, I mean, he's not as profound as Shakespeare, but he recognizes the excellence of Shakespeare, right, huh? You know, from the end of his life there, you know, when he was talking to Pierre Irving there, he said, it's really idle for the rest of us to seek any credit for what you've written, you know? Shakespeare, maybe one or two others, you know, Shakespeare said it always said, you know, find something in there. So, I mean, he recognized that, huh? He came to recognize Mozart, too, you know, Don Giovanni is the opera of aquas, right, huh? The glorious music of Mozart he refers to, right? He has very good judgment there. Great, great, great. You have to. You have to. You have to. You have to. You have to. Okay, we're on page 33 there at 304, which is the beginning of the fifth reading of Thomas. So this is the fifth and the sixth readings here, which take up the rest of this chapter, will bring us right to the door of reason. As Aristotle says in the Nicomachean Ethics, reason more than anything else is man. I sometimes ask the students, you know, which is more you, your reason or your emotions? Of course, their first tendency is to say their emotions. And then I try to recall the experience, you know, of getting angry or something like this and saying something they wish they had not said, and they cool off and they come back and they apologize, you know, the next day. I'm sorry about what I said yesterday. You know, I wasn't myself yesterday. And I lost control of myself. But something was in control of you yesterday, namely anger, right? So when the emotions are in control, supreme control of you, then you've lost control of yourself. And that's not something just the philosophers say. Everybody says that. When reason is in control. My other example is that you're in the bar there and Joe's about to get in a fight with a guy and you see trouble and say, Joe, get control! Of course. And you're kind of holding Joe back from starting the fight. But something is in control of Joe, right? Anger or some other emotion. And he's about to get into a fight and so on. But then Joe is not in control of himself. And that's a sign that, what, we think that reason is more than anything else you, right? When reason is in control, you are in control. When anger is in control, you have lost control of yourself. Well, that shows that reason is more you than what? Emotion, huh? The other example I give is other things being equal. Where you, as a member of the jury or the judge or whatever it is, consider a crime of passion, right? If someone, you know, angers or aroused, and a man comes home and finds a man with his wife or something and kills the man. Or a premeditated murder, huh? Which do you judge more severely? I mean, they're both obviously severe, right? But other things being equal, the premeditated murder, everybody would judge, as a member of the judge or the jury, more severely. As if you are more responsible for a premeditated murder, because you've had time to, what? Think about it, right? You really have been planning to murder so-and-so using your reason and really choosing to do so, right? And when you do something suddenly out of emotion, you seem to have reason less involved, right? Okay? So reason, more than anything else, is man. But, you know, students want to say, first of all, my emotions identify with their emotions, but it's not really them, most of all. Or as soon as I ask them, you know, if you want to start a fight, you're more apt to start a fight by saying to somebody, you're wicked, or by saying you're stupid. And for some reason, it seems that, although it's worse to be wicked than to be stupid, they're more annoyed by being called stupid than by being called wicked, huh? They sometimes rejoice in their wickedness, right? Their evilness, huh? Okay? As if they somehow identify themselves more with their reason than even their, what, heart where their wickedness is, huh? But we won't get to reason until next time, right? We've got to do five and six today. And here our staff is going to stop now and talk about what imagining is, huh? Or what imagination is. In Greek you have the word, what? Phantasma. Okay? Phantasia. And in the first of these two readings, on number five, we're starting at 304, he's going to argue what imagining is not. And then, at the beginning of the sixth reading, which begins in your text there at number 318, he's going to be saying what imagining is. So, 304 he says, But concerning understanding, since it is different from sensing, as we saw in the previous reading, while of this, one seems to be imagination, huh? Following upon sensing, and the other belief, now, determining about imagination, then later on we'll speak about the other, right? Okay? If, therefore, he says, imagination is that according to which we say some image comes to be in us, and if we do not mean something metaphorically, perhaps in English you could say, we say, what? It appears to me, right? It seems to me, right? You seem to be making some kind of, what? Discernment, right? Between the truth and the false, right? True and the false, some kind of judgment, huh? If that's true, he says, it is some one power habit, and he reads it kind of up in the open, whether he's talking about a power, or a, what? Habit, a disposition of some power. Of those according to which we discern, and speak truly, huh? And speak falsely. And the next sentence there, in the Greek there, you don't have the word powers, right? It just says, and these are. So these, the, refers back to power or habit, right? And the translator there, stuck in the word powers, but it's not in the Greek, right? Okay? So he's saying, the powers or habits, huh? By which we discern, huh? Between things, distinguish between them, and speak ye the truth or false. These powers seem to be, or, not these powers, but, I'm quoting the translator now. These are, sense, opinion, science, and, what? Understanding, huh? Now, he's mentioning these because they were clearly identified before, at least by, what? Plato, right? And, you know how Plato was kind of a follower, to some extent, of the Pythagoras, huh? You learn from many people. But, Pythagoreans were always using numbers, right? And everything, according to Pythagoreans, was numbers. And Plato saw some truth in this, huh? Even Aristotle sees some truth in this when he talks about it in the ninth book, the eighth book of wisdom, right? And sometimes these four were identified by Plato or were tied up with one, two, three, and four. Okay? Now, it's not too clear exactly why the Pythagoreans and others wanted to go to one, two, three, and four. But they do add up to what? Ten, right? No one knows exactly why we tend to count to ten and start over again, right? And one, two, three, and four. And in the first book, which we didn't read much of, in the first book, these four, Plato, connects with the one, two, three, and four. And understanding with one, right? That could be if you want to translate that by science, you could, right? Okay? A reasoned out knowledge, right? Okay? Science, or science in the sense of a reasoned out knowledge. That's two. Three is what? Opinion. And four is what? Sense, okay? Now what the Pythagoreans were doing, was trying to reduce everything to numbers. And so they're trying to explain everything by numbers. And perhaps this expression you still have, I got your number, is Pythagorean meaning and origin, right? And you and I would be a lot more understandable if there was some number to explain. So sometimes I joke about that, always felt an affinity. The number five, maybe that's the number that explains me, I don't know why I got this attraction to five, but likeness is a cause of love, right? And so they would have even, you have an opinion of Pythagoreans that the soul is a self-moving number. And they would try to find a number for the different virtues. And so I say to the students, do you think the virtue of justice is an odd number or an even number? What do you think? An even. Yeah. Of course we see that now. If you go to the store and you buy something for me and you're going to settle, and I say, are we even now, right? Okay. Are people going to get even with somebody, right? In the name of justice or supposed justice, I'm going to get even with you, right? Okay. So they're trying to see a likeness between numbers and things, right? And, uh, a lot of ingenuity in this, huh? Yeah. Now, in what ways are likeness between these four numbers and these four, uh, habits or powers whereby we reject, huh? Well, understanding here is referring to something, uh, that we know without having to think it out or reason it out, something that we kind of naturally know. Like everybody knows that a whole is more than, what? A part, right, then? Okay. So that's like one, right? You see it all at once, huh? Science or reasoned out of knowledge is something like you have in a demonstration of geometry, huh? Where you reason from what? The premises to the conclusion. So you have two there, right, huh? Opinion, you're not too sure, right, huh? So in the case of opinion, maybe you have a reason to think it is so and a reason to think it is not so, right? So your basis could lead to two things, yes or no. So that's represented by, what? Three. Okay? Right here, in geometry, say, when you have science, you reason from your premises to conclusion, uh, that an isosceles triangle, the angles opposite people's sides are equal, right? You don't at all reason to do the opposite, too. But in opinion, where you're not sure, you might say, well, I see some reason to think it is so and reason to think it's not so. So in the dialogue called Amino, right, Socrates reasons that virtue can be taught and then you reason to think it cannot be taught, right? You don't do that in epistamia, you're in science. Euclid doesn't reason, uh, give a reason why those angles should be equal in the isosceles triangle, right? And a reason why they may not be equal, right? It just comes down on one side, right? So it's one to one. Here it's one to what? Two. Okay? Now why does four represent the senses, yeah? Premises and possible conclusion. Yeah, yeah. Opposing conclusion. Yeah, yeah. Here you reason from your premises to only one of convictive statements, right? But in the Amino, when he doesn't know for sure, he reasons from his premises to virtue can be taught and he reasons to what cannot be taught. So you have three, right? The premises and the two opposite conclusions. Now, why does four represent the senses? It's kind of subtle. What is it like that's there? It's a little different, the basis there for four, right? The body. Yeah, yeah. If you stop and think about it, right? Two points determine a, what? A line. It's a straight line, right? Now if you have a third point that's not on that line, you connect it, and then you have a, what? Same thing. Surface, right? If you get a fourth point that's not on this surface and you connect them, you now have a, what? A body, right? Okay? And the senses are, what? Bodies, right? Oh. So four, right, represents, what? Body, right, then? A certain connection. You need four points to specify a body, right? Two points, all you do is specify a line, right? Three points, and a, what? Surface, huh? If they're not in the same line. If not a body, right? You need a fourth point to connect with them, it's off that surface, and then you have a, what? Body, right? Could you also say, because they're bodily, and bodily, and material? That same thing, you know, in a way. Yeah, same, sure. I didn't actually hear all that you said about number one. I was thinking about... Okay. Well, here you see you're not reasoning from one thing to another, right? So it's represented by something obvious right away. A whole is more than a part. Here you have to reason from something to something, right? So you have two, right? What you reason from, and what you reason to. Here you have, not only are you reasoning from something, but you reason from something to two different things. It is so and it's not so, right? Here you're not reasoning at all, but you have a body, right? And four is the number of points you need to, like, specify a body, right? Okay? Would the number one then be what we've been considering, as if people could say, natural understanding? Yeah, natural understanding. Yeah, natural understanding. We also just call it understanding because it's understanding about anything else, so to speak of that. And so in Greek they sometimes call it noussum, understanding. In Michael and Thomas would call this habit intellectus, right? Okay? So some of these things are not really, this is not really, as Thomas points out, the power of reason, the power of understanding. Because then you wouldn't divide it against these things that are in you. But these are different dispositions or different habits and conditions of reason, right? Of the power. Yeah. But this here might be a power, right? So that's why he kind of says, it is some one power habit of those according to which we discern and speak truth and speak falsely. And as I mentioned, the translator stuck in the word powers, but Aristotle in the Greek there just says, these are, right? He uses the preposition, right? I mean the pronoun, right? And so these refers back to what? These powers are habits, right? Yeah. Okay, because sense seems to name more power and opinion and science, very definitely name more habit or disposition. Natural understanding could be used sometimes to name power, but maybe here it's used more to name the natural understanding that disposition or habit. So in 306 now he's going to start, first of all, and argue against it being, what, sense or sensing. But therefore it is not sense as clear from the following. And he's going to eliminate its being, what, science or understanding. He's going to get a common reason for that. And then finally he's going to come down to opinion, which it seems most of all to be like, right? And he's going to kind of somewhat repeat what he'd said in the earlier reading we saw last time. That therefore it is not sense as clear from the following. For sense is either a power or an act, like set or seeing. But something appears even though neither of these two is present. The things in sleep. One's not usually at least as power, right? A little confusing there. But he's certainly not sensing, right? When he sees this, huh? I had a dream the other night. I must have seen that a little bit of the John Paul II thing, you know, the Wagle thing, you know, based on his book, right? His biography. And I had a dream about John Paul II. And you know how you dream, I guess, right before you wake up? And we were in the library there, see? And John Paul was apparently trying to get out of the crowd, so to speak, right? And he kind of got back into the stacks like you have in the library. And he had a tabernacle in there. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And I don't know if you saw me, I was kind of observing him, you know, around the corner. And the tabernacle was there and he was singing to the tabernacle, Pange Lingua. And then all of a sudden he started talking about the games on the football, or baseball games, right? And my wife had turned on the little radio next to the thing there. And I was just waking up with that thing and the voice on the radio seemed like it was John Paul II. All of a sudden he stopped talking about, you know, singing Pange Lingua and he was giving me these things. But there, originally I was not sensing, right? I was just, what? Imagining. So imagining seems to be something different from what? Sensing. Again, he says sense is always present on the animals, but not imagination.