Euphuia, discernment, and Aquinas' Plato-Aristotle option regarding knowing as identity

This has to do with the question, how did Aquinas know he had to choose Aristotle's theorem of knowing as identity over Plato's theorem of knowing as confrontation. (See also my Wisdom Epistemology article somewhere...). Pat Bryne, in his International Lonergan Workshop Jerusalem contribution, has something very useful on the point, in fact, he sheds great light on the matter, when he notes that for Aristotle, dialectic alone was not enough; something called EUPHUIA was needed, which can perhaps be translated as discernment. 

Question to Pat Byrne:

when Thomas makes a choice between Plato and Aristotle, between knowledge as confrontation and knowledge as identity, is he exercising euphuia? if he is, then your paper is casting wonderful light on what has been a little question for me for several years...

Pat Byrne's reply, 4 april 2015:

     As for Thomas’s choice between Plato and Aristotle, between knowledge as confrontation and knowledge as identity, that is a question beyond my expertise, but it sounds right. Strictly speaking, what Aristotle means by euphoria should be preceded by a meticulous dialectical analysis. That would mean that Aquinas himself should have done something like the questions and answers put to both Plato and Aristotle as sources of great acumen, come to the options of what confrontation vs. identity imply, and then chosen knowing by identity on the basis of the inner light (of both the unrestricted desire and faith). I don’t know how much Plato he actually read. In Verbum Lonergan is contrasting Aristotle’s knowing by identity with a Platonic knowing by confrontation, but he does not actually offer texts to show that Aquinas himself actually did that. Aquinas seems to have gotten the great insight from his careful reading of Aristotle’s De Anima. Whether Aquinas also saw that this posed a dialectical choice against Plato, I am not sure.
        Be that as it may, at some point Aquinas himself no doubt realized he had to abandon knowing as confrontation, because of the options it leads to, and that itself certainly would have been an exercise of euphuia.
        This was a great question. I never thought of applying it in this way. When I heard C.D.C. Reeve explain this, the lights went on for me also — a problem in Aristotle’s dialectics that has been also bothering me for years, and something I never found explained satisfactorily by any other Aristotle scholar.

Identity of knower and known

In the area of human cognition, confrontationism, or transferred empiricism, was flourishing. Its principal axiom was that an object is prior to an act concerning that object. (Aristotle and Aquinas distinguished between the sensible, the intelligible, sense, intellect, in potency, in act; they asserted the identity of the knower in act and the known in act; but Scotus and his predecessors and followers taught the identity of the known in potency and the known in act.)
From this there can be no 'intelligible in sensible data,' no 'quiddity in corporeal matter'; and if there is understanding [of the intelligible in the sensible], it is an illusion." (Supplementary Notes on Sanctifying Grace CWL 19:567)

Questions for and about Lonergan

I am just back from Thomas Chacko's defence of his thesis, Lonergan's Virtually Unconditioned: The Ground of Judgment, at Dharmaram Vidya Ksetram, Bangalore.

The defence was a rather vigorous affair, with four on the board including the chairperson / moderator, who was also the Dean of the Philosophy Department, and Director of the thesis, Saju Chackalackal. The others on the board were: Jose Nandhikkara, Wittgenstein specialist; Mathew Chandrankunnel, specialist in science and religion; and myself for the Lonergan angle. Saju is a Kant specialist.

The style of defence at Dharmaram is, as I have said, rather vigorous: a no holds barred attack. That, the professors told me, is how they interpret intellectual honesty and challenge.

Some of the questions for and about Lonergan were interesting: Does Lonergan have anything original to contribute, or is he simply repeating Aristotle, Aquinas and Newman? What is the difference between Lonergan and Kant? The only difference between Aquinas and Kant is that Kant was more honest about the limits of knowledge; otherwise, both are agreed that human knowledge is a product of sense intuition as well as the mind. Is Lonergan a critical realist? Then he cannot be an empiricist. Is he empirical? Then he cannot be critical. And so on.

The Kant thing particularly stunned me. Is there no difference between Kant and Aquinas, except in the direction of greater honesty or modesty? I think we have to reflect here on the basic assumptions: does Aquinas assume - as I presume Kant does - that there is a primordial split between subject and object, that we have privileged knowledge of the subject, and that the problem of epistemology is that we have to get from subject to object? Does he not, as Lonergan points out, make an option between Aristotle and Plato - Plato who thought of knowledge as confrontation, and was then faced with ultimate duality when thinking of the knowledge in the Ultimate, and Aristotle who thought of knowledge as perfection and identity, so that he had no problem of duality when thinking of divine knowledge?

Memory, experience, art

Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book I 980b 25 - 981a 6:

The animals other than man live by appearances and memories, and have but little of connected experience; but the human race lives also by art and reasonings. And from memory experience is produced in men; for many memories of the same thing produce finally the capacity for a single experience. Experience seems to be very similar to science and art, but really science and art come to men through experience; for "experience made art," as Polus says, "but inexperience luck." And art arises, when from many notions gained by experience one universal judgment about similar objects is produced.

The philomythos and the philosophos

Aristotle, Metaphysics Book I 982b 12-20:

For it is owing to their wonder that men both now begin and at first began to philosophize; ... And a man who is puzzled and wonders thinks himself ignorant (whence even the lover of myth is in a sense a lover of wisdom, for myth is composed of wonders)... 

Aristotle on feelings

Aristotle seems to have a different take on feelings from Plato.

He has the famous definition of tragedy as effecting a catharsis of the two emotions of pity and fear. (Poetics ch. 6, 1449b)

Cooper comments: Good art [note the adjective 'good'] can benefit both understanding and emotions - or better, in doing either of these, it does both. I.e. if it benefits one, it benefits the other. to benefit one is to benefit the other. The reason Aristotle can say this is that he rejects Plato's Manichean divide between reason and the passions. (Recall the higher and lower parts of the mind.) Far from the latter being always a distraction to reason, it will often be irrational not to feel, say, shame or anger. Mature understanding and mature emotional sensitivity are inseparable elements of the good life. And art can contribute to both. (Cooper 29-30)

In contrast to Plato for whom art itself is bad, we find Aristotle here speaking of good art (implying, presumably, that there is also bad art).

Poetics ch. 13, in fact, talks about what should not be shown in poetry: virtuous men passing from good to bad fortune, since this does not arouse fear or pity, but only outrage; bad men passing from bad to good fortune: this is neither tragic nor does it satisfy human feeling, nor does it arouse pity and fear; nor a wicked man passing from good to bad fortune: this would satisfy human feeling, but not arouse pity or fear. So there is one alternative left: the man who is not pre-eminent in moral virtue, who passes to bad fortune not through vice or wickedness, but because of some piece of ignorance, and who is of high repute and great good fortune.

Poetry, history and philosophy

In contrast to Plato, who spoke of the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry, Aristotle makes poetry closer to philosophy than to history. Where history deals with the particular and contingent, poetry deals with the probable or necessary - and so it approaches philosophy which, according to Aristotle, deals with the necessary.

The essential difference [between history and poetry] is that one tells us what happened and the other the sort of thing that would happen. That is why poetry is at once more like philosophy and more worth while than history. (Poetics ch. 9, 1451a - 1451b)

What is interesting is that Gadamer thought it fit to look to art as a way of conceptualizing the approach to truth in the human sciences - including, I suppose, history.

But keep in mind also Lonergan's distinction between human studies and human sciences. History would be part of the former, while sociology part of the latter.

Amplitude

Aristotle's remarks on amplitude are fascinating (Poetics ch. 7, 1450b - 1451a).

He is obviously dealing with art and beauty. "It is not enough for beauty that a thing, whether an animal or anything else composed of parts, should have those parts well ordered; since beauty consists in amplitude as well as in order, the thing must also have amplitude".

And not just any amplitude, he goes on. Too small a creature cannot be beautiful, "since our view loses all distinctness". Neither is an enormously ample one beautiful, since our view of it is not simultaneous, so that we lose a sense of its unity and wholeness. The ideal seems to be 'the ampler the better, provided it remains clear as a whole.'

I am thinking of Michelangelo's David: it is huge, much larger than I had expected, and breadth-taking.

And Monet's Nympheas: you can't take it all in at one glance, simply because it is painted all over an oval shaped room; but it does have its own beauty!

Aristotle on art and truth

Aristotle takes pains to link art to truth. Thus he notes that mimesis is innate to human beings, that we take our first steps in learning through it, and that we take pleasure in instances of mimesis because we enjoy getting to understand something. (Poetics 1443b)

Art and truth

It is only when one recalls Plato's repudiation of art, one of the grounds being that it is doubly removed from the real and the true, that one begins to appreciate the significance of Gadamer's turn to art in order to discover there an approach to truth.

But then Gadamer, Plato scholar though he was, is relying here on Aristotle's phronesis, and Aristotle was, according to David Cooper, the first philosopher on record to appreciate the distinctive functions of art, and its value and claim to truth.

The five intellectual virtues

The five intellectual virtues according to Aristotle:

1. techne: knowing how to do something
2. episteme: knowing that something is the case
3. phronesis: this has an unmistakable social dimension, and can mean anything from 'practical wisdom' to 'human understanding' to 'moral discernment' to 'knowing how to prosper' to 'political acumen' to 'savoir faire', etc.
4. sophia: knowledge of cause and effect
5. nous: typically divine, informs the others, and is a final cause of the others. It is the activity of the divine side of our nature.

Cf. Eric von der Luft, Hegel Society of America, Book Review of Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, tr. Terence Irwin (Indianopolis: Hackett, 1985). Modern Schoolman 66 (1988) 79-80.

Being and Essence

I am busy this month composing a note on Being and Essence for the new IGNOU course on Philosophy, at the behest of George Panthanmackel, MSFS. I think the CBCI / CRI have managed to persuade IGNOU to offer a philosophy course that would be largely designed by Catholic philosophers, and would be meant to serve Catholic philosophy students - while being open, naturally, to all. This would be a way for our seminarians to have their philosophical studies validated as a civilly recognized degree.

Panthanmackel has been released to supervise the work for 6 months. I believe he is based in Delhi, from where he coordinates especially the writing of notes for the course.

Being and Essence has never been a topic I have been interested in. With a largely Thomist / Lonergan background, one tends to be more interested in esse and existence, rather than essence. I took up the challenge, however, with the intention of seeing how the discourse about being and essence could be led to the recognition of the capital role of esse and existence.

The study has proved to be interesting, however. I discovered that I - and perhaps others - tend to read Plato and especially Aristotle through the lens of Thomas, assuming that Thomas' distinctions are to be found in Aristotle. I am discovering that ousia / being, essence and substance are not at all as clear as they seem to be. It seems that with every book Aristotle has a slightly different meaning of ousia, and substance. And in the middle of it all is his to ti en einai, which Thomas rendered quite literally as quod quid erat esse, and which Lonergan explains as the form or the formal cause, not the essence. What Thomas calls essence is Aristotle's to ti estin, says Lonergan.

But I have to check all this.

I must confess that, thanks really to Panthanmackel, I opened Aristotle's original works for the first time in my life. I am really ashamed about that, but there is always a first time... So.