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Home>Early Modernity>Introductory Overview
(I don't have the first-hand knowledge of all the (quite challenging!) texts to explain authoritatively what 'Scholasticism' as a whole says about understanding but I can do my best with Aquinas - who was the founding figure. For the more widely based account, beautifully accessible as well as authoritative, you can turn to Anthony Kenny's volume on Medieval Philosophy.)
Can we follow Aquinas when he explains how he conceived of 'understanding'?
The root idea is that understanding is a matter of participating in the category a thing belongs to.
Obviously that will need quite a bit of explanation...
The first thing to get clear about is the absolutely central role the notion of a thing's 'category' plays in Scholastic thought. Suppose I am looking at a badger. That badger was thought of as a particular thing. But it was, according to Scholastic thought, a particular thing that belonged the category 'badger'.
While you could see the particular thing that was the badger, it was thought that you couldn't actually see the category 'badger'. The question arose then of how you got to know about the category if you couldn't straigtforwardly see it. We will come back to this central question shortly.
The way I have put it sounds as if you could have a heap of particular things and then, if you wanted to, you could perhaps sort them into categories.
But that threatens to set us off on completely the wrong track.
Scholastic thought considered that you couldn't have a particular thing that didn't belong to a category. And it was its category that gave it all its important features.
These ideas about a particular thing being necessarily a thing of a particular sort were expressed through the notion of a thing's form. A particular thing, eg a badger, was thought to be matter with form. And it was a thing's form which made it the sort of thing that it was.
'Understanding' a thing was therefore a matter of accessing its form. Accessing the thing's form told you what sort of a thing it was, and in telling you that it told you what features the thing had - or at least what the features were that were important for it. You would be 'understanding' the thing in front of you if you knew that it was a horse and consequently what its 'essential' features were.
I say you were thought to do this by 'accessing' the thing's form. What do I mean by 'accessing'? The Scholastics thought that you accessed a thing's form by coming to share it.
In a word then we might say that understanding was considered to be a matter of sharing the category a thing belonged to.
That is quite a strange skeleton to have to articulate, but with more flesh on the bones the figure - I think - becomes more intelligible.
The first bit of flesh I want to hang is an explanation of the deep significance of what I am calling the 'categories' things belong to.
"Reason has to do with universals, sense with singular things." Aristotle, De Anima, II, 5 (417b 22)
The idea at the bottom of the Scholastic notion of form is that the ability to 'handle' categories is very special indeed. You can imagine a robot being able to receive data from its environment through sensors and then being able to respond to certain inputs in certain ways. For example, a sensor suddenly picks up the colour red in front of the machine as it moves forward and, following its simple programme, it stops.
And you can also imagine a machine in which a great deal of complex processing goes on between the sensor passing on the 'red' signal and the machine making its response. A clever machine would be able to discriminate between the red signal coming from a roadside advert and one coming from a set of traffic lights. Processing of this kind would involve seeing the red alert as belonging to a category . There would be no one way of programming a more sophisticated response, but all of them would involve putting the input data into a category. It might be put into the category of advert, to begin with maybe, or the category of traffic light; perhaps then seeing these as belonging to the categories respectively of 'ignorable' and 'instruction to stop'. With category processing, you could programme behaviour which went far beyond the simple 'red-stop' of the basic automaton.
| A word of clarification: the term usually used in the literature to refer to what I am calling 'categories' is 'universals'. I generally persist with 'categories' because it seems to be more helpful to the modern mind trying to follow Aquinas' thinking. |
Though Aquinas didn't think in these terms, he thought nevertheless that the capacity to handle categories was highly significant.
He saw it as the thing which either on its own, or in conjunction with other powers, put human beings, in the context of nature as a whole, in a class of their own. He linked it with their possession of language, and with their capacity, as he thought of it, for a distinctive kind of thought - a kind of thought of which other animals were incapable of.
First, the link with language.
Using language seems to involve categories almost all the time - perhaps absolutely all the time. How can you say anything without using a category? 'The cat is on the mat' involves categories at every point - 'cat', and 'mat' and 'on' obviously, 'is' perhaps when you think about it. And if you try harder and come up with eg 'I exist' or 'Cripes!' you will probably conclude that these involve categories as well.
So talking involves working with categories.
The fact that talking involves handling categories does not of course prove the reverse - that handling categories requires the capacity to speak. But still it has been tempting to some writers to assert this second thing too, that it is the human capacity for language that gives them the power to handle categories, and that this power could not be provided by anything else. And this thesis has been attributed to Aquinas (Kenny; footnote 1).
Before modern times - before say 1950 when Turing's "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" was published - it was assumed very widely that if a person were to conduct 'category-handling' (as I am referring to it), it would have to b done in thought.
For example, Kenny [ref] takes it for granted that the capacity to handle categories is excercised by thinking (by a particular kind of thinking he calls 'conceptual' thinking).
The Scholastics thought of the capacity to handle categories as a very special one, and one that marked out human beings as a very special part of creation. Other animals were capable of seeing things, hearing things, touching things etc - were capable of sensory experience - but they were not equipped, they thought, for the handling of categories. They enjoyed awareness of particular things, but could not think of those particular things as belonging to kinds.
One fundamental consequence of this was that they were taken to be incapable of reasoning.
Intuitively, one can see the plausibility of the claim that reasoning requires the reasoner to see how categories are related. And when the Scholastics went beyond intuition to try and develop what they thought of as the rules which governed valid reasoning, they laid all the stress on categories and their interelationships. Scholastic logic took as central the form of reasoning known as syllogistic, and syllogistic reasoning was explicitly based on category relationships. For example:
All men are mortal
Socrates is a man
Therefore, Socrates is mortal
Socrates is perhaps a particular 'thing', in the terms we have been using, but 'men' and 'mortal' are both categories in their different ways, let alone 'are' and 'is'; and expunged of categories the syllogistic logic would be nothing.
So for Scholasticism the capacity to handle categories, unique (in the lower creation) to human beings, equipped them alone for reason.
| Individual things - eg a horse, a plough - are accessible directly through our senses, eg sight. But what is not accessible to our senses is the sort of thing the thing is. |
Animals inferior to human beings were capable of seeing the particular things before them, thought the Scholastics, but the categories things belonged to were not there to be seen.
That is, all that we see when we look about us (or have any kind of sense experience) are individual things - for example, a tree, a badger, a house. But the categories they belong to are not things that are accessible to sense at all. That is, Aquinas' assumption is that when we look at an individual animal our senses alone cannot tell us what kind of an animal it is. Footnote 3.
Aquinas thinks that nevertheless, human beings do usually know what kind of animal they are looking at. So the question for Aquinas is then: if they don't acquire this knowledge from their senses, how do they get it?
They get it, Aquinas thinks, by somehow accessing the individual animal's form.
"[T]hrough the intellect we can understand these objects [natures which exist only in individual matter] as universal; and this is beyond the power of the sense." FOURTH ARTICLE [I, Q. 12, Art. 4]
This solution flows directly from the basic Aristotelian-Thomist conception of a thing as matter-under-a-form. The form is precisely that which confers on the individual thing membership of a category. So to get knowledge of what category the individual thing in front of you belongs to you have somehow to 'read' its form.
How do you do this?
First, notice that the aspect of a human being which we must think of as conducting this 'reading' of a thing's form must be the human form. It cannot be the matter of the human being, because if the matter could 'read' a thing's form, everything could! Rocks, plants, brutes, all these have matter, so that if matter had the power to 'read' forms, you wouldn't have to be a human being in order to deal with categories. No, the power to deal with categories must belong to the aspect of the human being which makes them distinctive, that is to say, their form.
"It is ... impossible for it [the intellect] to understand by means of a bodily organ..." (Aquinas, ST, Q.75 Art 2)
Somehow then - and I don't think Aquinas was addressing the question of how it was done exactly - for understanding to happen, the form of the human being had to engage with the form of the individual object to be thought about.
On this assumption, and working with the conception of a thing as matter-under-form, can we say anything more about what understanding involves?
Aquinas thinks we can.
Often, Aquinas recognises, the human being thinks about things that are no longer in front of them. They may be things, for example, that they once saw but are now long gone. This means that the categories which are involved in the thinking must either be accessed now, at the time of thinking, even though the thing itself is no longer there, or they are somehow still accessible in virtue of the thing once having been in front of the thinker.
Aquinas believes, for reasons I don't fully understand, that to access a thing's form it needs to be in front of you - you need to be sensing it at least, 'perceiving' it in some modality at any rate - through sight, or touch, or hearing etc...
You might ask, why isn't it possible, within the Thomist framework, to think of the form of a thing being accessible even though the thing is not accessible to the senses? It is clear, as I explain elsewhere, that he thinks you can access a thing's form, once you have seen that thing, through memory. But what of the case where you have never seen (or otherwise sensed) such and such a thing? Is there anything in Thomism which rules out the possibility of your accessing its form nonethless?
The answer I think is a complicated No. He tells us that "the very fact that intellect is above sense is a reasonable proof that there are some incorporeal things comprehensible by the intellect alone." Summa, [I, Q. 50, Art. 1] His topic there is 'angels', but elsewehere he makes it clear that God is another example. Human beings, he says, can have some kind of understanding of God even though God is not a body (and thus is not to be seen with the senses) and develops convoluted argumentation in an attempt to reconcile this nostrum with the rest of the Thomist framework.
He clearly dismisses the nostrum that "no created intellect can see the essence of God" as "untenable" (Aquinas, ST,Q I Art 12 p.I 71.) and is clearly committed to the proposition that human beings must 'see' God. But we see Him, he says, not 'by sense or imagination, but only by the intellect." I Q12 Art3 p75. (And then: "we have no means for considering how God is, but rather how he is not..." Summa, I,Q III, Intro. )
As far as bodies are concerned however it seems that Aquinas thinks you can't access their forms except in conjunction with seeing or otherwise sensing them. The question for Aquinas then arises: if thinking involves accessing a thing's form, and you can only access a thing's form in conjunction with sense experience, surely it follows that you can only think of things that are in front of you, that is, things you can look at or hear or smell or whatever at the very time you are doing the thinking?
Aquinas of course finds a way of rejecting this counter-intuitive conclusion. The fact is, he explains, that you only have to access a thing's form once: thereafter it is 'retained' by your intellect and may be brought into thought even though the thing is no longer present.
That is, if a person is to think about a thing when it is not present, they have to access the form at a time when the thing is present and store the fruit of this 'accessing' until they want to do the thinking. The form has to be stored so it is still there even though the thing itself has gone, and even though it is not actually playing a part in current thinking.
Aquinas expresses these points by talking about two different powers of the human form. One power is to access the form of the thing to be thought about. The other is to store the fruit of that access until it is brought into thinking. (I say 'fruit' of the access because I don't know what else to call it. It is whatever is the outcome of the act of accessing the form of the thing to be thought about.) Aquinas confusingly speaks of two things, as though they were some sort of components of the thinker's form. He speaks of the 'agent intellect' as whatever it is that does the accessing, and the 'receptive intellect'' as whatever it is that does the retaining. To me it seems easier to think of them not as components but as powers of the one thing, the thinker's form. (Remember that Aquinas does think there is just the one thing that is the thinker's form.)
Thinking, then, for Aquinas, involves handling categories, and categories are made available through the operation of the rational animal's form, first the agent intellect making the form of the thing thought about 'intelligible', and then the receptive intellect keeping the 'intelligibility' ready for when thinking requires it to be in play.
You may feel that as Aquinas saw it the ambition to 'understand' was a vital but in a way circumscribed enterprise - an enterprise that babies simply must carry off successfully if they are to become capable of thought, but which in the end is after all a project of limited sophistication - grasping the categories to which things belonged. The child has to become aware of the categories things belong to. And though we don't know yet how the brain does even this, there is surely to Modern eyes something more to understanding than simply this? Concepts may make thought possible, but surely, though they make it possible for important questions to be raised (Are horses safe to eat? Is there any escape from mortality?) the concepts alone don't begin to answer them.
It may be argued however that this underestimates the significance of understanding the 'natural kinds' to which things belong. Modern science works with the notion of a 'natural kind', it may be said. When it fires a proton down a tube to strike and fragment another proton it is to find out what that proton is made up of (especially to find evidence for the existence of the postulated subatomic partcle called the Higgs boson (in the Hadron Collider). But in order to get started on an experimental design it has to assume that one proton will act 'essentially' like any other.
Here you have a notion of a 'natural kind' in play.
There has to be the assumption that broadly speaking the result you get from shooting one particular proton at a second individual proton will tell you about protons in general. Of course you won't be satisfied with just one run of the experiment - you will want to check by repeating it with other individual protons, perhaps many times. But if you get the same results each time you will feel safe in thinking you have found out something about protons in general.
I think this means the protons constitute a natural kind.
Can you imagine this experimental programme running into the problem of protons not being a natural kind? That would be a matter of repeating the experiment with things that had nothing 'essentially' in common with each other - a random heap of things. You would get different results each time and no way to predict what would happen if you tried it again.
I say 'essentially', and I shoudn't: everything depends on what I mean by it, and I'm not sure I'm clear enough to say what. But maybe you get the suggestion: a natural kind is a set of things within which 'induction' is reasonably reliable ....
And, more to the present purpose, if the Modern scientist is trying to identify what are the 'essential' properties of a target particle they may appear to be doing the same thing as Aquinas indicates in saying that to seek understanding is to seek to identify what is 'essential' to a thing...
Along that line of thought lies the suggestion that the difference between Aquinas' notion of understanding and the notion in use by Modern scientists (and by the rest of us?) is not about the project as such but about the method of achieving it.
(One thing that belongs to Aquinas' metaphysics and not to the Modern though is the belief that in creating the world God created a fixed number of kinds of thing, and the belief that the number remains what it was in the beginning. If we think of animals, Aquinas was committed to the belief that they bred true. That is, the progeny of lions are lions, and lions can't breed successfully with other kinds.)
There are other sources of knowledge according to Aquinas. You can come to know what he calls 'principles', knowledge you acquire through encounters with particular instances of the principle, and you can come to know particular facts about things, things which are true of it but which don't flow from its essential features. You get this kind of knowledge through the senses.
Individual things - eg a horse, a plough - are accessible directly through our senses, eg sight. But what is not accessible to our senses is the sort of thing the thing is.
Aquinas thinks we access the thing's 'sort' through the operation of what he calls our active intellect.
The sort of thing that a thing is - the category it belongs to - is somehow carried by the thing's form. What the active intellect does is to bring it about that as we sense the individual we at the same time 'participate' in the thing's form.
(Aquinas thinks the operation of what he calls the 'receptive' intellect brings it about that we can access the thing's form even though it is no longer perceived by our senses.)
Understanding is participating in a thing's form.
Understanding is closely linked to knowledge. A thing's form carries its 'essence' - ie all the 'essential' features of a thing, that is to say, all the features which together make it the type of thing that it is. Gaining access to a thing's form therefore gives a person knowledge of the essence of a thing.
There are other sources of knowledge according to Aquinas. You can come to know what he calls 'principles', knowledge you acquire through encounters with particular instances of the principle, and you can come to know particular facts about things, things which are true of it but which don't flow from its essential features. You get this kind of knowledge through the senses.
_______________________
The category a thing belongs to is encompassed by its form. Acquiring knowledge of the category a thing belongs to is thus a matter of accessing its form. This is achieved by the operation of the agent intellect.
For the agent intellect to access the form the thing has to be present to the senses.
The form remains available to thought even when the thing is no longer present to the senses in virtue of the operation of the receptive intellect.
The fact that talking involves handling categories does not of course prove the reverse - that handling categories requires the capacity to speak. But still it has been tempting to some writers to assert this second thing too, that it is the human capacity for language that gives them the power to handle categories, and that this power could not be provided by anything else. And this thesis has been attributed to Aquinas. (Kenny)
I dare to think this may be mistaken. Aquinas appears to me to maintain that animals are able to handle categories, as in this passage:
"Some things there are which act, not from any
previous judgment, but, as it were, moved and made to act by others;
just as the arrow is directed to the target by the archer. Others
act from some kind of judgment; but not from free-will, such as
irrational animals; for the sheep flies from the wolf by a kind of
judgment whereby it esteems it to be hurtful to itself: such a
judgment is not a free one, but implanted by nature." Summa Theologica [I, Q. 59, Art. 3]
The 'judgement' by the sheep that a wolf presents a danger is surely being presented by Aquinas as involves the capacity to deal with categories. If so, he is not thinking of the capacity to handle categories as the power to use language. The sheep is being thought of by Aquinas as handling categories in spite of not being able to talk.
Aquinas seems to me to be thinking that involved in whatever it is that an animal has inside it for directing its behaviour is a 'faculty' that is capable of handling categories - eg the category 'wolf' and the category 'hurtful thing'. This he does without any suggestion that an animal can talk.
Kenny [ref] takes it for granted that the capacity to handle categories is excercised by thinking (by a particular kind of thinking he calls 'conceptual' thinking).
And indeed Kenny claims that this was Aquinas' view. In insisting on the importance of the capacity for handling categories he is to be understood, says Kenny, as insisting on the importance of 'conceptual thought'.
But the fact is, as I have just insisted, Aquinas maintains that animals are capable of handling categories. If Kenny were right on this score we would have to think of animals as capable of 'conceptual' thought.
These two arguments about possible links between category-handling on the one hand and on the other language use and thought might be put like this: If Kenny were right in holding (a) that handling categories required language and (b) that handling categories was only to be done in 'conceptual thought', then we would have to think of animals as (a) language users and (b) conceptual thinkers. |
3.
Aquinas' assumption is that when we look at an individual animal our senses alone cannot tell us what kind of an animal it is.
This assumption seems to be shared very widely. It is there in Aristotle and Plato, it is there in Locke and the early Moderns, and it is there also in recent work - by Dennett for example. What is its basis? Perhaps the question is this: what can a human come to know which they couldn't possibly get directly from their senses? As we would think of the problem today, what knowledge could I possibly posses which I haven't acquired from the data stream being received by my senses? (This is the question to which the 'pure' empiricist would give the answer: none. - Though beware, there may never have been any of these.) One interesting answer to the question is this: a piece of knowledge that the data stream coming into us via the senses can never give us on its own is this: the knowledge that such and such a bit of data is simliar to such and such another one. This is a piece of knowledge that requires comparison between two bits of data, and for a comparison you need processing which goes beyond the reception of the bits of data themselves. The argument goes on: categories are basically similarities when you come to think about it, so that if the senses can't by themselves do comparing they can't all by themselves yield knowledge of categories.
In any event, this is the conclusion shared across the Western tradition: the categories things are thought of as belonging to are not given directly by sense. We may think of an animal in front of us as a cat, but its being of the cat kind is not given to us through our senses.
YOU ARE HERE Scholastic Background - understanding |
Early Modern Conception of Body Early Modern conception of Mind Early Modern notion of understanding |
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Revised 14:01:09 Prepared by VP Home Page of Web Presentation: Conceptions of the Human Being in the West
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