I am wondering what it means to say I know, for example, Jim the ferret. If I have never seen a ferret before, and I smell and set eyes on Jim, in this first seeing I know not just “this”, but also “ferret” - though I may not yet have a clear concept of ferret. I smell and see Jim. I know that the smell and the shape belong together. Moreover, I can tell that there are perhaps two smells, and one is Jim, the other not. When I see another ferret, I think “oh look, another one of those things”.
I do not see a lake of various colours, and analyse them into shapes, and then from analyses of many similar shapes identify members of a set I choose to call “ferret”, and by observing the temporal co-incidence of certain shapes and a certain pattern of smell-sensation, conclude that the two go together. And then decide that another pattern of shifting colour is so similar to the first, that I will class it as “ferret” as well.
Since in this philosophy knowledge is caused by the thing known, the action of the object on the knower, and is a union of the known and the knower, the knower in some way becoming the thing known, we can immediately see that the unity of Jim-as-known-by-us must be in Jim. What remains to be explored is how the unity of Jim is found, in a certain sense, in me, although Jim-in-me arrives only by a kind of refraction through the senses.
The proper objects of the senses are a certain class of accident, a kind of being. What makes an accident an accident is that it has its being from another. Where substantial form gives being to that which it informs, whereas accidental receives being from that which it informs. So the being, the esse by which the sensible accidental form exists and informs, actualises the knower, is in fact the esse of the subject.
This actualisation of the knower is physical, sensible, particular. Jim is actually sensed, but not understood; being a material being, he is actually sensible, but only potentially intelligible. Likewise, my particular physical knowledge of Jim is only potentially intellectual knowledge.
We know that we come to intellectual knowledge of natures, to knowledge of universals, through abstraction from the phantasm, which in this case is (I think one can say this, though of course I am now wondering) Jim-in-me, the action of Jim on me (present or recalled). It is not the phantasm itself that we know – the word names an action or result of an action by Jim in me, a presence of Jim in me, and it is Jim I know. Jim is able to inform me, act on me, physically, but his material being cannot of itself have any contact, touch in any way, my intellect.
St Thomas teaches that we have one soul. With different parts and powers, but one. Material beings can inform the lower part of the soul – and the soul itself enables them to form the intellect, lending as it were its immateriality to something that has it only in potentiality. [I think that maybe an interpretation I read in Fr M.A. Krąpiec, OP's Realizm Ludzkiego Poznania – the realism of human knowing, and not my own, but I agree with it, tentatively.] And so through abstraction we arrive at knowledge of universal natures and so on.
However, is there not some intellectual knowledge of the singular? It seems there may be. I do not mean a knowledge independent of the phantasms, but one which while reliant on them is truly a knowledge of the singular. It must be a knowledge of Jim under some immaterial aspect. Jim of himself has no actual intelligibility - it is actualised by the intellect. So I wonder if the universal nature of ferret might be, as it were, lent particularity by the individual soul. Or if the fact that the universal nature is known by an individual soul does not involve or imply some kind of particularity. ST I.89.4 says that in the infused knowledge of species, the separated soul knows the individuals "to which it has some kind of determinate relation", to which it is "determined by former knowledge in this life, or by some affection, or by natural aptitude, or by the disposition of the Divine order", because "everything received is received according to the mode of the receiver".
And that is where the essay will go when it is written, but this post is already so overdue that I will put it up as it stands. Which may suggest that this post is the casual work of a half-hour or so - it's not! I hope that its many gaps and loose phrasing will provide fuel for many comments :-)
2 comments:
Dear Weronika,
We certainly have some intellectual knowledge of the singular thing - or else we wouldn't talk to each other - but the question is what kind and how. By 'conversio ad phantasmata' is St Thomas's constant response, but what exactly does this mean? Your post sent me to Maritain's 'Introduction to Philosophy' and thence to Ferrariensis' commentary on the Summa contra Gentiles (published in the Leonine edition with St Thomas's text, as Cajetan's is for the other Summa).
He discusses the question at some length in commenting on Bk 1 c. 75, 'Whether God knows singular things'. He compares the human intellect's knowledge of the singular thing to e.g. the ear's knowledge of substance. Properly speaking, the ear hears sound, but it can be said 'per accidens' to hear a substance, such as a man or a cat, insofar as this subject is conjoined to the sound. Likewise the proper object of the intellect is some intelligible nature, but it is said to know the individual thing per accidens because this nature is 'coniunctum singulari'.
Still, the problem is perhaps this. What exactly does my knowing of the intellgible nature have to do with the phantasms in my imagination? If I see a tree, I know 'tree' with my intellect, and I have phantasms in my imagination corresponding to the material conditions - e.g. colour, proportions, shape - under which tree is realised in this particular case; but what do the two acts have to do with each other? Perhaps the answer is this: precisely because I know tree by abstraction, part of my knowing it in any given case is knowing it as being abstracted from these phantasms. Ferrariensis says, 'Ex ipsa cognita, [intellectus] format in se conceptum phantasmatis et singularis a quibus ipsa species [intelligibilis] est aliquo modo causata.' In other words, he argues that a new concept is formed by the 'conversio ad phantasmata'. This new concept is a 'proper concept', i.e. it gives us an intellectual knowledge of this individual thing sufficient to distinguish it from any other, but not a 'quidditative' concept, i.e. it doesn't show us something that would be essential to this tree as opposed to any other, but just allows us to distinguish it from any other by some accidental features, e.g. position. He says of this reflex concept 'ille conceptus immaterialis existens...materiales conditiones immaterialiter repraesentat, sicut et species intellectus angelici.'
So I would say that it is not simply the fact that we are individuals that allows our abstracted knowledge to give us awareness of individuals, but the fact that it necessarily carries in its wake phantasms of the individual from which it came. I.e. because the phantasms are instruments which the agent intellect uses to produce the abstracted knowledge, we have a natural tendency to think of an intelligible nature as a nature-coming-from those-phantasms; and in this way to know the individual intellectually.
The separated soul is in a rather different position in that it doesn't turn to phantasms since it has no imagination. Its infused species are in principle for it to have a directr (non-reflex) knoweldge of all singulars. In practice, it only has a clear knowledge of those to which it has some inclination. I like Cajetan's commentary: 'Cognitio fit per hoc quod cognoscens est cognitum...Secundum quod anima magis determinatur ad unum quam ad aliud, consequens est quod secundum hoc magis accedit ad esse actu unum quod aliud'; and therefore it knows it, or knows it better than it would otherwise.
Well, I was thinking about the fact that the phantasm exists with the being of the subject, not with the being of the object. (though obviously the accidental qualities acting on the sense were doing so by virtue of the esse of the object).
There is some distinction here that I don't know how to make. Because clearly the phantasm is caused by the object in one way, and by the subject in another. So, am I right to say it has being in one sense from one and in another from the other? But in what sense?
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