|
Home>Early Modernity>Introductory Overview
If understanding for Aquinas was a matter of accessing a form, and so discovering the natural kind to which a thing belonged, what was it for the early Moderns?
For Aquinas, sometimes understanding comes very easily, just by looking - or, more accurately, by what often accompanies looking, the sharing of the form through the work of the intellectual form qua agent intellect and then qua receptive intellect. But sometimes, it was acknowledged, even by Aquinas, a thing's form was not so easily accessed and 'shared'. As Bacon says, heralding the breakdown of Thomism (as science) in the 16th Century, forms are often terribly 'perplexed', so much so that you cannot get at them 'directly':
'the forms of substances I say (as they are now by compounding and transplanting multiplied) are so perplexed, as they are not to be inquired...' Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, V (5).
It may be argued that you can cast the philosophy of the new science in Thomist terms: if you take a 'particle', a hadron say, which the physicist is attempting to 'study' scientifically you can describe the enterprise as one trying to establish 'what kind of a thing it is', or, which is what this amounts to for the Thomist, of attempting to identify the properties that are 'essential' to it. Isn't this a fair way of describing the scientific project?
A rejoinder might be: the physicist is not interested in any particular kind of things - s/he is interested in matter. The laws of motion apply to anything made of matter.
But if it is believed that 'matter' consists ultimately of some kind of 'fundamental' particles, I suppose the study of matter resolves into an attempt to understand what is essential to them. That is to say, maybe you can see the Thomist view that understanding is a matter of grasping what is essential to a thing as consistent with the early Modern view that understanding a thing is grasping what is essential to the things that are correctly identified as 'fundamental particles'.
So if we are trying to identify the shift that turns its back on Thomism (as a science) and launches Modern science we are driven back perhaps to method. Maybe the Moderns had a different way of getting at forms and this was the distintive feature of Modern science?
How then we ask did Aquinas think we should get at things' forms? Sometimes, yes, it is clear he thought it was enough to look at an object and your intellect grasped its form. But sometimes it wasn't. Aquinas, ST, Q.79 Art 4 Pegis, p.345
When this didn't happen, what method was available to you, according to Aquinas, to acquire an understanding of a thing? The answer seems to be that the human intellect 'reaches to the understanding of truth by reasoning, with a certain discursiveness and movement.' Aquinas, ST, Q.79 Art 4 p.344.
Could it be then that the revolution was a matter of putting empirical study, perhas especially experimentation, in place of unaided reason as the appropriate strategy for gaining new knowledge?
When the new scientific thought emerged however its message was not that you could discover the forms of things through a different methodology, it was that the Thomists were concentrating on the wrong target. This at any rate was the clarion call of Francis Bacon.
Bacon's charge is that the old guard were concentrating on functional explanations at the expense of identfying physical causes:
Explanations of features eg of animals in terms of the function served - eg thick skin is there to protect from extremes of heat or cold - are 'but remoras and hindrances to stay and slug the ship from further sailing; and have brought this to pass, that the search of the physical causes hath been neglected and passed in silence. '
Advancement of Learning, Ward Lock edition p. 74; Cassell e-text.
bud
So for Aquinas,
The early Modern period launched with the new thinkers placing emphasis
_____
Understanding for the Moderns was possessing an idea, not sharing a form. For Locke, understanding what a horse was involved assembling a general idea in your mind, and you formed the general idea by assembling bits from a variety of ideas you got from particular sensory experiences.
But more than this, for the Moderns the question of 'understanding' shifted completely. (The focus shifting first, then that change leading to a change in how 'understanding' was conceived.)
Can it be argued that the hylomorphic formula: get to the truth of what makes a thing the thing that it is? covers the activity of Modern science? So that
Understanding for the Early Moderns
Pegis says we stopped trying to understand. We did. We concentrated on understanding the play of physical causes instead.
Things held together as individual objects, according to the new thinking, not because of any organising role of a form but because of the play of forces between their constituent fundamental particles.
YOU ARE HERE Early Modern Conception of Mind v. Intellectual form |
Early Modern Conception of Body |
_______________
For Aquinas the problem centred on how thinking was possible, given that thinking involved categories, and given that categories were not directly available through the senses. It must be, he thought, the distinctive power of rational creatures to be able to do this, and it must be done by what was distinctive about the human being, their form. Somehow - I don't think Aquinas was addressing the question of how it was done exactly - for thinking about a thing to happen, the form of the human being had to engage with the form of the individual object to be thought about, because it was the form of the individual object which placed it in its category.
This line of thought relied on the theory that thinking necessarily involved categories, a theory that he got from Aristotle: you can't think of a thing except as a thing of a sort.
Why did this nostrum seem unchallengable? The question you have to ask is: What can 'thinking' be? Thinking was thought to be the thing that is distinctive of human beings. But, it was believed, animals can see things, feel pain, hear sounds, prefer some tastes to others - etc. What non-human animals can't do (thought Aquinas) is conceive of categories and see how categories relate to each other. That would be thought. That would be reasoning. That is the power, Aquinas believed, that belonged to the rational animal.
So: thinking involved conceiving of categories.
Drafting
This is to construe Aquinas' conception mechanistically. He is not proposing a two stage mechanism, one to make the form accessible and a second to actually access it. But it is not a thesis about a mechanism. It is a thesis about what has to be thought of as happening somehow: and two things have to be done. the form of a thing has to be made accessible to thought, and then has to enter into thought.
___
the focus moved to understanding of other kinds. Indeed, the problem of 'understanding' when it came to thinking about a horse (eg) became thought of in an entirely different way.
The problem became thought of as a matter of understanding a word - the word 'horse'.
ia horse' there was more to understanding than grasping the category to which a thing belonged. Understanding became increasingly a matter of knowing how a thing worked.
Early Modern physics studied not what categories such and such belonged to but the presumed laws which governed the behaviour of material objects in general.
___
Aquinas appears to think that what you have to do is to 'share' in the form of the thing whose category is to be grasped. This sharing cannot be done by your body. It has to be done by your own form.
And he thinks there are two steps to this:
First, the intellect first renders 'intelligible' the form of the thing being understood. Then it grasps and retains that form.
Because the form is what makes a thing the sort of thing that it is, it seems to follow that understanding something involves becoming that sort of thing! - since it is a matter of coming to share the form of the thing being understood.
This is obviously a very difficult implication to take on board, and scholars disagree about how it is to be understood. 'Intelligible in actu est intellectus in actu' - these are the enigmatic words which express the Thomist thesis, translated by Kenny as 'thought in operation is identical with the object of thought'.
Here are some other words where Aquinas seems to acknowledge the problem:
"[T]he intellect naturally knows natures which exist only in individual matter; not as they are in such individual matter, but according as they are abstracted therefrom by the considering act of the intellect..." FOURTH ARTICLE [I, Q. 12, Art. 4]
Understanding for the Moderns was possessing an idea, not sharing a form. For Locke, understanding what a horse was involved assembling a general idea in your mind, and you formed the general idea by assembling bits from a variety of ideas you got from particular sensory experiences.
But more than this, for the Moderns the question of 'understanding' shifted completely. (The focus shifting first, then that change leading to a change in how 'understanding' was conceived.)
But first let me reprise the two key points I have been trying to make.
First, understanding must involve some kind of accessing of the form of the thing to be thought about. This flows directly from the hylomorphic conception: it is the thing's form that confers on it membership of its category. To get at its category you need to access its form.
Second, we remember that the human being doing the thinking is matter_under_form also. Aquinas thinks that it follows from this that the aspect of the human being involved in accessing the form of the thing to be thought about must be the human form (and not the human matter). (If matter were able to access forms, not just animals and plants but corporeal things of all kinds would be able to access them, and Aquinas is committed to the view that accessing forms is something rational creatures alone posses - rational creatures alone can conceive of categories, they alone can think (and talk).
According to Locke, human beings made categories. On the basis of sense experience you constructed categories. They were just sets of things which had properties in common. 'Concepts' had to be grasped in the new world, but there was a further aspiration. Suppose the question was: how is it that such and such a substance makes you feel drowsy if you drink it? Moliere made famous the Scholastic answer: because this substance has the power to make you drowsy. Corpuscularianism's alternative answer was that the particles making the substance up impacted on some of the particles inside the body of the drinker. The second answer is entirely compatible with the first but it opens up a distinctive line of enquiry. You might go on to ask: how do you find out what gives the substance its stupifying power? The scholastic answer is reasoning, by which Aquinas meant adhering to the movements of thought articulated in Aristotelian syllogistic.
______
Human beings, alone amongst creatures of the earth, have 'understanding', which is to say, according to Aquinas' account, that they have the power to 'handle' categories. One of the ways in which you exercise that power is to talk about the categories that individual things belong to. Another is to draw inferences from one statement involving a category to others - eg from the statement that this individual is a horse to the the statement that the individual is an animal. Another is to draw inferences from category membership to statements about individual, eg from This is a horse to This has four legs. (In logic as conceived of by the Aristotelian tradition, what you try to do is set out the rules governing category membership.)
Notice first that for some Moderns at any rate you could have thoughts of a kind without without categories. Locke thought you constructed categories in your mind by comparing your ideas of individual things, but, prior to that, having the idea of an individual thing, or at least of the colour of a thing, for example, or the sound it is making, counts for him as thinking. (This one aspect of the widening of the notion of thinking that takes place in the new period.)
What accessing forms was thought to do was to yield knowledge of what was 'essential' to the thing. 'essential meaning here that which made the thing a thing of its kind.
The essential features of a thing were the features which it together conferred membership of its kind. We might ask: How does it help to know a individual thing's essential features?
It doesn't help! What it does is to enable you to see what natural kinds there are - ie to see God's creation, for it was God who was considered to have created the limited number of natural kinds that we find in the world. This wasn't a useful thing but more an expression of piety.
The early Moderns too were interested in a thing's essential properties, but now 'essential' had come to mean something quite different. For them it means those properties which could be usefully studied. Properties which were idiosyncratic to a particular individual could play a role in the behaviour of that one thing, but the properties really worth knowing about were those that belonged to lots of things.
If understanding is a matter of grasping the category to which a thing belongs, we have to remember that a thing belongs to many different categories - maybe an infinite number. If a thing belongs to the category horse, then if it is brown it also belongs to the category of things that are brown, and if frisky it will also belong to the category of things that are frisky, and if it is standing in a field in Surbiton, it will belong also to the category of things that are standing in that Surbiton field; - and so on. But still: Aquinas (following Aristotle) thought that the category horse was a special type of category within this multitude. The category horse was a 'natural kind'.
You may feel intuitively that there is something in this idea - that being a horse is more 'fundamental' in some way than being brown, or frisky, or one of the things in that Surbiton field. Much discussion has taken place in an effort to put the finger on exactly what 'fundamental' here might mean. Supposing there is something defensible in the idea then Aquinas' formula would appear to be:
BUD
YOU ARE HERE Early Modern notion of understanding |
Early Modern Conception of Body |
|||
|
|
 |
Revised 14:01:09 Prepared by VP Home Page of Web Presentation: Conceptions of the Human Being in the West
|