Epistemology, Great Books, Metaphysics, Ontology, Philosophy

On the Intellect, Induction, and Abstraction

by Dave Seng

It was a good idea to call the soul ‘the place of forms’, though (1) this description holds only of the intellective soul, and (2) even this is the forms only potentially, not actually. – Aristotle

[Note: In my previous posts, I spoke about Aristotelians and Thomists as being innatist in their epistemology. I should have been more clear about this terminology because realists are not innatists in the Platonic sense. Human beings are not cognitively pre-loaded with the Platonic forms. Aristotelians are innatist in a very strict sense. What is innate, according to classical realists, is the capacity or potential to receive the form, universal, or essence of the sense object as it is in act. (See, for example, the last chapter of Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics for further explication.) I will try to develop this theme as we move along.]

In our most recent posts on Berkeleyan idealism, we learned that the mind is structured to receive and apprehend reality as it is. In other words, being is the touchstone of all reality. Being is, and can not be denied (it can not be otherwise because it would be non-being or nothing). We also learned that the intellectual faculty of judgment has both metaphysical (ontological) and epistemic or psychological aspects. When the mind is working correctly, one knows reality. Concrete reality is the proper starting point for metaphysics, not one’s theory about it (one’s theory of reality could be wrong, which is why, again, being is the touchstone of reality). In this post, I will try to explicate the basics of how the intellect works at the foundational level—at the reception of being—what Aristotelian philosophers call the intellect. This will lay the groundwork for why metaphysical realists claim that one can know reality as it is and provides further insight into the distinction between apprehension and concept—the central confusion and philosophical error among idealists, although I will develop that in upcoming posts. For now, it is important to understand how the intellect itself works.

First, what is the intellect? The word comes from the Latin terms, intus, and legere—to read within. The intellect is the cognitive capacity that humans have to think rationally, carefully, and logically about the perennial questions of existence as they find it. It is the intellect and the ability to reason which separates humans from animals. Although humans are animals, they are not simply or just animals. It should be obvious that humans have different cognitive abilities than that of animals. In addition to sense knowing, which all animals have, humans have the ability to reflect on and arrive at deeper understandings of their sense knowledge. As noted in previous posts, to sense something and to understand something is not the same thing. I can hear a foreign language but not understand it. My cat can see the same image of a sign on its retina as I do, but have no understanding of what it means, while I can easily grasp its message. Just as humans are different in kind from animals, there must be some faculty in the human mind that is different in kind from simple sense perception. This faculty is called the intellect or what philosophers in the Aristotelian and Thomist traditions call the agent intellect.

The agent intellect is a special faculty of the mind and has two important functions. First, the intellect is in potency to knowledge—it does not know to start with (it requires the act of existence to motivate it because it depends on being, as act is prior to potency). Second, as immaterial, the intellect receives the essence, universal, or form of the external object through sense perception. Aquinas reminds us, “Now it is natural to man to attain to intellectual truths through sensible things, because all our knowledge originates from sense.”1 The senses are the only connection one has to reality. Even so, what comes into the intellect has an immaterial rather than material mode of existence. The tree I am looking at through the window does not exist as a physical tree in my mind. The intellect grasps the form or essence of the sense object. This is because there is an immaterial aspect to all reality. To account for this essential reception, however, there must be a prior ability, capacity, or function in the intellect which apprehends the form of the material object. The same form of the material object exists in the intellect that exists in reality, only the mode of existence is different. This second function of the intellect is an immaterial apprehension of the material form or essence. This is what Aristotle calls the agent intellect and the reason why he calls the intellect, or soul, “the place of the forms.”2 The agent intellect apprehends the essence of the thing perceived. The nature of the agent intellect is to receive the object of sense perception3.

A question remains, however. How do the forms or universals get into the intellect?

The intellect is in potency to knowledge and has a capacity to receive the essence of an external object. Now, it is important to understand how the form or essence of a thing is delivered to the intellect. Briefly, this is accomplished by induction and abstraction. Induction, or inductive reasoning, is the logical process of thinking in which the conclusion follows from experience, examination of particulars, and arriving at generalized or universal principles—for Aristotelians, the foundation of all subsequent reasoning. Aristotle held that wider and wider generalization is derived from repeated empirical experiences of particular things until the essence or universal concept is established in the intellect. Philosopher Ed Miller puts Aristotelian inductive reasoning it this way:

From the experience of the particular man Callias, the man Socrates, the man James, the man Tad, the man Bill … the intellect derives the general or universal idea of man, that is man as such. From the experience of the particular dog Fido, the dog Lassie, the dog Rover, the dog Flip … the intellect derives the universal idea dog. And the universal ideas—man, dog, and innumerable other concepts derived from experience in the same manner—become the tools and building blocks of all reasoning. They then make it possible to say and know, “Socrates is a man,” “In fourteen hundred and ninety-two Columbus sailed the ocean blue,” etc.4

Aristotle compares the formation of the universal in the intellect to the formation of soldiers making a stand against a wartime enemy:

We conclude that these states of knowledge are neither innate in a determinate form, nor developed from other higher states of knowledge, but from sense-perception. It is like a rout in battle stopped by first one man making a stand and then another, until the original formation has been restored. The soul is so constituted as to be capable of this process. . . . When one of a number of logically indiscriminable particulars has made a stand, the earliest universal is present in the soul: for though the act of sense-perception is of the particular, its content is universal—is man, for example, not the man Callias. A fresh stand is made among these rudimentary universals, and the process does not cease until the indivisible concepts, the true universals, are established: e.g. such and such a species of animals is a step towards the genus animal, which by the process is a step towards a further generalization. Thus it is clear that we must get to know the primary premisses by induction; for the method by which even sense-perception implants the universal is inductive.5

In fact, Aristotle believes induction to be the basis of all other knowledge:

From experience again—i.e. from the universal now stabilized in the soul, the one beside the many which is a single identity within them all—originate the skill of the craftsman and the knowledge of the man of science, skill in the sphere of coming to be and science in sphere of being.6

Metaphysics, the study of being as being, is the science in the sphere of being. In other words, metaphysics is a kind of science in the Aristotelian and Thomist tradition. Being is at the center of whatever is thought or done. One can not change the oil in his truck or complete a math equation without referencing being. Being, however, is the first act of knowing. The intellect can only understand the universal or essence of any external object through induction.

Aristotle’s notion of induction is very similar to the concept of abstraction put forward by St. Thomas. Aquinas focuses on the idea that the mind can remove, withdraw, or pull out the concept of redness from viewing various red objects. One understands the concept of justice by examining just actions. Abstraction is a general idea, universal, or essence that the intellect removes from the multiple expressions of the same form found in the particular instances of it (the essential nature of the particular whether it be dog, cat, chair, human, or concepts such as the good, true, beautiful etc.).

St. Thomas helps us understand how the intellect moves from the particular to the universal (here “intelligible species” means essence. “Phantasms” are the mental images of things):

Our intellect cannot know the singular in material things directly and primarily. The reason of this is that the principle of singularity in material things is individual matter, while our intellect … understands by abstracting the intelligible species from such matter. Now what is abstracted from individual matter is the universal. Hence our intellect knows directly the universal only. But indirectly and as it were by a kind of turning back (reflectio), it can know the singular, because … even after abstracting the intelligible species, the intellect, in order to understand actually, needs to turn to the phantasms in which it understands the species. … Therefore it understands the universal directly through the intelligible species, and indirectly the singulars represented by the phantasms. And thus it forms the proposition, “Socrates is a man.”

Classical realists, then, begin with being—the concrete particular things encountered in the sensible external world. Being is more than physical reality but never less than it. With the universal firmly in place in the intellect one is enabled to return and know reality through reflection and judgment. One can genuinely think about reality, know it, and express it, “Socrates is a human being.”

For Further Reading:

Holloway, M., “Abstraction from Matter in Human Cognition”, The Modern Schoolman, Vol. XXIII (1946), pp. 120 – 130.

For a more general introduction to Thomist epistemology see:

Wilhelmsen, Fredrick. Man’s Knowledge of Reality: An Introduction to Thomistic Epistemology. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1956.

I wrote about the Aristotelian distinctions of act and potency here.

Works Cited

Aquinas, Thomas. The Summa Theologica Volume 1. The Great Books of the Western World, edited by Mortimer J. Adler et al., Vol. 17, Encyclopedia Britannica, 1996.

Aristotle. The Works of Aristotle Volume 1. The Great Books of the Western World, edited by Mortimer J. Adler et al., Vol. 7, Encyclopedia Britannica, 1996.

Miller, Ed. Questions that Matter: An Invitation to Philosophy. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996.

Footnotes

1Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Trans. by Father Laurence Shapcote of the Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1996) 1a, q.1, art. 9.

2Aristotle, On the Soul (De Anima), Trans. by J. A. Smith (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1996) 661.

3 While we are distinguishing the important faculties of the intellect, it is also very important to be aware that the whole person is involved in knowing. This requires a bit of development and goes beyond the scope of this post but I plan on explicating this notion in time. For now, it is important to understand that for those in the Aristotelian and Thomist tradition, the entire person is involved in apprehending reality. This is because form and body (matter and form) are united and should never be separated. Not only does the individual know and understand things through deduction and induction, humans also know through connatural knowledge—the lived and embodied contact one has with others and reality itself. This involves knowing through empathy, lived human experience, intuition, and the contact of the intellect with the truth of reality itself by other holistic ways of knowing such as imaginative literature, the arts, and history. Embodied knowledge means knowledge through the whole person and by way of all the arts and sciences. The Platonic tradition sees form and matter as separate which, if unchecked, leads to idealism. Idealism is the result of disembodied knowledge, a disembodied epistemology. Platonist metaphysics rests on the separation of form from matter and provides the foundation for the error of idealism.

4Ed Miller, Questions That Matter: An Invitation to Philosophy (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996) 235.

5Aristotle, Posterior Analytics (Analytica posteriora), Trans. by G.R.G Mure (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1996) 136.

6Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, 136.

Metaphysics, Ontology, Philosophical Theology

The Being of God and Christian Metaphysics

by Dave Seng

What cannot be measured by physicists does not exist in reality. – Stephen Hawking

No scientific discipline can hope to equal the seriousness of metaphysics. Philosophy can never be measured by the yardstick of the idea of science. – Martin Heidegger

One cannot escape the fact of being. Being, or existence, is the first thing we experience when we wake up. Being is encountered whenever we change the tire on a bicycle. Being is what we experience when driving our children to school, when we ask about the diameter of the sun, or inquire about the difference between perception and reality, or wonder about the kind of being that numbers have but numerals do not. We experience the significance of being whenever we encounter its first principles such as the law of noncontradiction, the principle of predictive uniformity, or the principle of causality. Try as we might, we can not escape the reality of being. Nor does it do much good to deny reality. Descartes’s doctrine of the Cogito demonstrates that one would have to exist in order to deny existence. Even if one were a complete solipsist or if even only one sentence existed in the universe, the fact of that one particular thing, mercilessly points us to the reality of being. Before we get to science, law, or economics, there is an ontological priority to being.

Metaphysics is the philosophical field that studies the ultimate ground of being. The task of the metaphysician is to explain the principles which ground all of reality and make it possible in the first place. Aristotle called metaphysics, “first philosophy” because it examines the first or most basic principles of reality. Metaphysics makes the study of being its central concern. It is not concerned with the particulars of science, law, or economics, but rather seeks to understand the first principles which make those fields possible and seeks to understand them in the light of all existence. The question of being is not one of genera or species, because being incorporates all other particulars. It is a singular question and cannot be divided into many. Science, law, or economics can give us understanding in a particular realm or field, but the metaphysician seeks to understand these things as a whole. As Martin Heidegger explains, “Every relationship to what-is thus bears witness to a knowledge of Being” (What is Metaphysics, 307). Being is the precondition for the particular sciences and yet points us back to Being. In this sense, metaphysics and the study of being point us to the wholeness of reality. The particular sciences can only provide portions of reality.

Science itself is grounded on philosophical and theological principles. One of the greatest metaphysicians and philosophers of science in the twentieth century, Alfred North Whitehead explains,

Induction presupposes metaphysics. In other words, it rests upon an antecedent rationalism. You cannot have a rational justification for your appeal to history until your metaphysics has assured you that there is a history to appeal to; and likewise your conjectures as to the future presuppose some basis of knowledge that there is a future already subjected to some determinations. – (Science and the Modern World, 156)

Since it is impossible to deny being, and given the fact that we live and move and have our being in existence, how do we understand it? Aristotle and Aquinas (among others) believe that the law of noncontradiction (nothing can both be and not be at the same time and in the same respect) is the first law of reality or being. Why is the law of noncontradiction the first principle of reality? It is impossible to deny existence and at the same time affirm it. Something either exists or it does not, being either is or is not. Given that we have the same meaning for our terms, if something does exist, then the laws of identity (a thing is what it is; a true proposition is true) and excluded middle (something either is or is not, with nothing in between; a proposition is either true or false) logically follow. The laws of logic are simply properties of being. Because the structure of reality does not change, these laws are just as true when Aristotle discovered them as they are today. In the same way, this is why the principle of uniformity and the principle of causality are true – they correspond to the structure of being. One may not have to be a Christian theist, however, to understand and accept the ultimate laws and principles of reality, although it would make it difficult to defend materialism because these principles are not of a physical or material kind.

Since the majority of metaphysicians were either theists of some sort (Xenophon, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Cicero) or specifically Christian theists (St. Paul, Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Augustine, Boethius, Anselm, Aquinas, Dante, Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz, Berkeley, Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, T. S. Eliot, not to mention Jesus of Nazareth), in what sense is it possible to speak of a Christian metaphysics?

Metaphysics, which explores the ultimate principles, axioms, and foundation of all reality and seeks to understand all existence in a unified whole, is not a specifically Christian endeavor. The earliest philosophers, the Pre-Socratics (Thales, Parmenides, Heraclitus among others), explored these questions usually in the context of the problem of the one and many. In addition, the use of reason, which philosophy and metaphysics depend on is not unique to Christianity. The fields of mathematics and grammar are shared by everyone. Our shared humanity and common sense give us the intelligibility of the universe, language, science, and culture. The laws of logic and structure of reality are the same for everyone at all times and places. To speak of a “Christian mathematics,” or “Christian grammar,” or “Christian engineering,” does not make much sense, using a strict definition of philosophy and metaphysics.

In a broad sense, I think it is possible, reasonable, and good to speak of a Christian metaphysics. Philosophy is not done as an abstraction, in the strict sense (simply understanding the right use of reason). It is explored by people who utilize the basic laws and principles of reality and seek to understand existence as a complete system. People choose the questions they want to explore and apply a good amount of thinking to them. That is why we can speak of Marxist philosophy, Feminist philosophy, or Post Modern philosophy in general. Different social groups engage in the great questions of humanity as well, and that is why we can talk about Muslim philosophy, Jewish philosophy, or Hindu philosophy. Perennial questions and those who are curious about them and think deeply about them often reflect their historical context. That is why it makes sense to identify Christian philosophy in the middle ages contrasted with Muslim or Jewish thought. It is why we can speak of the Christian philosophy of St. Augustine contrasted with various Roman philosophies such as Stoicism or Manicheanism. In a very general and broad sense, Christian philosophy is that philosophy which understands that reason, correctly used, is a support and handmaid to theology. Clement of Alexandria is correct in this regard–reason everywhere supports the Christian faith.

To the degree that Christian philosophy reflects truth, it will reflect truth that is common to all, based on the common sense of mankind. That is, it will take Being, or existence, as its starting point as did the first metaphysicians, the pre-Socratics. Being is absolutely undeniable. Christians take as their starting point that God is being. The definition of God as Being comes from the Scriptures. One of the most significant verses in the Bible for Christian metaphysics is Exodus 3:14 – God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I AM has sent me to you.'” Another correct translation reads: “I am who causes to be” That is, God is Being in itself. It is God who causes to be. This is also the language St. Paul uses in Acts 17. He is the source and ground of all reality. God is existence itself. Jesus himself confirms this concept in Mark 14:62, when Jesus was asked whether or not he was the son of God, he said, “I am” and John 9:5 “I am the light of the world.” The “I am” of Jesus and the implication it has for Christian metaphysics is important. Being, in the absolute sense, is God. We cannot utter a sentence or think a thought without reference to reality or being. We cannot correctly write a sentence without the verb “to be.” The laws of logic (logos) come from God as the ground of Being. One implication for Christian philosophy, apologetics, and metaphysics is that we must understand that God is ontologically prior to any miracle or discussion of the deity of Christ. Why? Because it is pointless to argue from miracle unless we understand that there is a God who can do miracles. Likewise, it makes little sense to argue that Jesus is the Son of God unless we have a prior understanding of who God is. This is why the great creeds of our faith, our confessional statements, and the Lutheran Scholastics all begin with the concept of God. God’s self-disclosure to Moses means we begin with metaphysics and understand that God is the ultimate source of all reality and history. Why is Christian metaphysics important? We cannot understand what evil is unless we have a prior understanding of what good is. In the same way, we cannot understand who we are and the nature of grace and salvation without the ontological priority of God’s existence.

Next time, I’ll discuss Aristotle’s conception of metaphysics as theology (or, at least, the relationship between the two).

For further reading:

Daniel J. Sullivan, An Introduction to Philosophy: Perennial Principles of the Classical Realist Tradition, (TAN Books, 2009).